Employee Benefits Live 2025: British Airways (BA) has redefined its approach to reward in order to meet the needs of changing employee demographics and the employment landscape.
Addressing delegates in the closing keynote session of day one, Redefining reward to support a modern workforce fit for the future, Josephina Smith, reward director, discussed how BA has been working towards a unified reward proposition for its global workforce.
With more than 36,000 employees in over 65 countries and a lot of legacy systems, Smith and her team had to take a new approach to reward.
This involved speaking to different segments of the workforce separately to find out what they wanted from a reward perspective, including directors and senior leaders, through to frontline workers.
“We connected with them, and tailored information to each group,” explained Smith. “One of the things that I’ve seen is that we don’t support our junior managers enough. They are the people that manage our people, and we need to be able to understand some of their pain points. Some of them find it difficult to articulate reward, they find it difficult to talk about wellbeing, they find it difficult to talk about inclusion, and all these things are sensitive. Are we giving them enough of the tools to be able to do that?”
A multigenerational workforce is another factor that has impacted BA’s reward decisions, Smith explained, especially around older people staying in employment.
“The low birth rates we have seen means that there is a shorter supply of younger people coming into the workforce, and that means we have to change our approach to service a whole load of different segments within the workforce,” said Smith.
As an example in an age of technology, she explained that employers may have to consider how they deliver technology to older people in the workplace who may need more training on how to use agile or AI tools.
BA has used AI to create tailored total reward statements for its employees in the form of a video; it presents a personalised summary of an employee’s total reward value with information about individual benefits. The video statements have been delivered to 4,000 of its management team already and it plans to roll it out to frontline employees later this year.
“It really means that you can personalise things and deliver to your employees compensation strategies at scale,” Smith said. “The feedback that we got was [better] than we expected.”
