Penguin Random House keeps employees informed about their total reward package through its benefits portal.
The portal offers the 2100 employees at the publishing organisation access to their individual total reward statements (TRS), as well as to its flexible benefits and employee discounts schemes.
The TRS show the total value of an employee’s package including salary, bonus, any benefits that they have bought or sold, or employer-funded benefits.
The reward statement is categorised into finance and protection benefits, lifestyle, and health and wellbeing. It is then broken down further to detail what the employer and the employee contribute towards each benefit, what the individual’s flexible benefits fund totals, the total cost of their benefits, and how it affects their salary.
Val Garside, HR director at Penguin Random House, explains that taking a total reward approach helps to best meet the needs of its workforce, while also informing employees about every aspect of their benefits package.
“The idea behind it is that they can see all that in one place, as opposed to just ‘here’s your salary and here’s your bonus’," says Garside. "Every year, we’re constantly looking to see what other benefits we can add in and how [do they] appeal.”
TRS are constantly updated throughout the year and employees are able to view them at any time. For example, it will update when an employee’s bonus is paid or changes are made to the benefits packages. During the annual flex enrolment window in March this year, details of employees’ pension contributions were added to the TRS for the first time.
“That was new for employees, that pensions was included on their total reward statement," explains Garside. "Equally, [employees] can go in and, for the first time, change [their] pension contributions in the portal instead of filling out a form.”
Via its flexible benefits scheme, the publisher enables employees to invest the savings made from flexing down cover on some benefits into others. Employees can reinvest savings, for example from selling holiday, into a personal training allowance to pay for any training or further education that is not job-related. This could include guitar lessons or training to become a hypnotherapist. The employer offers the allowance in addition to the other benefits as a way of supporting personal development and interests outside of the workplace.
Penguin Random House reviews its offering each year to ensure that the benefits available to employees are relevant and valued. This year, new benefits included an art pass, which provides free or discounted entry to museums, galleries, historic houses and exhibitions, new cancer screenings for bowel, cervical and prostate cancer, and a virtual GP service.
Read more:
Total reward for the modern workforce
Adam Kingl: Rethinking reward for generation Y
