An Overview of Total Rewards & Their Impact on Employee Experience

Full Transcript

Tom Horne: 

Welcome back to All About HR. Super excited for our second episode of season three here in January 2023. We have a new guest, somebody I met briefly at a conference earlier this year and we reconnected in the last week. I’m really excited to welcome Leo Tokar! He is the President of People Solutions at Lockton Companies. He provides consulting and brokerage access across total rewards areas including employee benefits, compensation, and retirement. He helps clients be more efficient at engaging talent and financially managing their rewards programs. His expertise is finding what employees value while also finding ways to reduce cost. This is what we brought him to talk about today on the podcast. Leo, welcome to All About HR. 

Leo Tokar: 

Thanks, Tom. I’m thrilled to be here. I appreciate you having me on. 

Tom: 

Yeah, really excited to be talking to someone else here in Denver as well. We don’t get as many local guests as I probably would like to have. So, I think this is a really great conversation. You know, we’ve been doing this podcast for three seasons and we’ve never really talked about total rewards. Recently, we started talking about benefits, so I think this conversation is going to be really good not just for my own education—that’s part of the reason we do this, so I can learn—but I’ve been in this space a long time. If I can learn here, I guarantee you there are a lot of other people out there who can too.  

Let’s start really at a base level. What is total rewards? I know what benefits are. Sometimes I see total rewards. Sometimes I see benefits. What is total rewards at a base? 

Leo: 

Yeah, everyone likes to define it a little bit differently so there’s no right or wrong answer. Some people say narrowly, it’s just compensation and benefits. The way that I frame it is it includes the entire package that you offer someone to come and work for you and stay there. So, obviously employee benefits, compensation, retirement, PTO, all the different perks that you offer, and to some extent the workplace experience. Generally, the tangible things that you’re saying here you go, this is what we’re going to give you, and then people ultimately react and decide if this is a good package or not. 

Tom: 

So, is there a size or is it more of a focus when it comes to benefits versus total rewards? I.e., is it a focus that a 200-person company can have a total rewards program, or is this something more for mid to large companies? Or is it really anybody can do it it’s just how you focus on it? 

Leo: 

Yeah, anyone can do it. The reality is, if I as an individual come and work for you, I’m not really parsing out all of the pieces and saying let me tell you how I feel about comp then employee benefits and retirement. I’ll have opinions, but at the end of the day, I’m saying how do I feel about the overall package that you’re offering me. What happens though in smaller organizations is you’re limited in resources. You’re just focused on things like is my comp okay? Each of those silos, are they okay? And as you get bigger you get more sophisticated at integrating the pieces even though you’ll have specialization in each of those areas. Then ideally there are people that are bringing it all together to say, how do our folks feel about the entire total rewards package? 

Tom: 

I feel like total rewards is how job seekers probably think about benefits. I’m kind of just taking this all in but total rewards are almost when a company approaches their benefits in a way that aligns with how their employees or job seekers think about their benefits. 

Leo: 

Absolutely. People care about each individual piece at a particular moment. If I’m using my employee benefits, I care about whatever benefit I’m using at that point in time. When you’re evaluating how you feel about your employer, broadly I’ll say your employee value proposition or what’s being offered as your EVP, then you’re looking at the whole thing. 

Tom: 

You mentioned employee experience and I want to dig into that, but at a top level, I feel like I’m already starting to understand. My one thought was like, well, how’s that employee experience? And my radar is up. Do you see everybody in this space right now trying to call every little bit that you can offer employee experience? I feel like that term is just so broad these days, right? 

Leo: 

Yeah, absolutely. I think things get just jumbled up quite a bit. Some people are talking about employee engagement specific to total rewards, which is one area. But employee experience can be really broad. It’s everything from your recruiting process and your onboarding process, what you experience in the culture, how you interact with coworkers, obviously DIB initiatives, and on and on. It’s the whole—I would say—branding and execution of your employee value proposition versus just the narrow part of employee engagement within total rewards. 

Tom: 

Yeah, it’s a good and bad thing, right? Because employee experience you want to take into account all these different factors, but I feel like on the vendor or the people that are supporting the HR side, everybody takes advantage of that and now it’s so convoluted. So, it’s one of those “yes, it’s great that companies are realizing how much goes into how the experience an employee has is.” But on the other hand, for HR professionals trying to bring on products and trying to focus on employee experience, I feel like it gets really confusing for them trying to figure out what really is going to affect employee experience. 

Leo: 

Absolutely. I think you could learn a lot from other industries and oftentimes people get siloed into just looking at your own industry or your own function. What you’re talking about is you could draw a lot of corollaries from marketing. People sometimes think about marketing as a lot of fluff or advertising or whatever. But there’s a huge amount of science to studying employee behaviors. And so, if you want to be a good marketer for your employees—which I would argue HR should be like the chief marketer—then actually understanding all those things that you just described, the whole continuum is big.  

The thing that goes hand in hand with employee experience—and I’m going way off on a tangent—is people analytics. So, really broad term, we don’t need to get into it, but if you can dissect all the pieces of an employee lifecycle from recruiting on all the way through resignation, then you’ll have a better understanding of behaviors and then you could attach to whatever you want to improve your brand. 

Tom: 

You’re speaking to the right person here. Being someone that does employee lifecycle surveys for a living, I couldn’t agree with you more. For me, this has already been a great podcast. I had ideas about total rewards. I’ve been in the space, but I think we’ve already really tied it together. Now I’ve got a whole bunch of thoughts, so we will have a really good podcast. There’s a lot that goes into this so step one, we can check that box. I’ve got a pretty good understanding at this point.  

Let’s take a quick pause on that. Let’s back up. I forgot to ask you the first question that I ask all my guests, so it’s going to be our second question. What are you listening to right now, Leo? 

Leo: 

I listen to a broad range of podcasts. One is Marketing School, so the comment that I made about being a good marketer doesn’t have anything to do with HR. It doesn’t really have much to do with even the people side of it, but you could learn a lot from people that are good in their space. So, I like that whole branding, people connection side of things.  

There are some books that I’m reading—Atomic Habits because I’ve gotten tired of listening to people talk about Atomic Habits so I just picked it up and read it; Fearless Leaders by a guy, TC North who is a great performance coach. Then I listen to stuff on real estate investing because that’s a side hobby of mine. 

Tom: 

It’s probably not a bad side hobby to have. If you know how to do it right, it’s a great side hobby. 

Leo: 

I’ve been lucky. 

Tom: 

That’s what all the people that are good at it say so I’ll put you in that good category. No, that’s great. I’ll put links to all this in the podcast. I’ll check them out myself.  

You mentioned that Marketing School. I think it’s really interesting that I’ve had a lot of guests and in a lot of the conversations we’ve talked about how HR is going through a transformation. Historically in a lot of cases—not all the cases—it was an admin function for an organization; post the jobs, fire the person, file the paperwork, and get benefits out in November. It’s really starting to upskill and HR is getting a seat at the table and it should. Because they should be the connection and the leading voice and force for all of your workforce. And in many organizations out there, that’s one of your biggest assets, biggest groups, and biggest populations within an organization.  

A lot of the advice we’ve heard is don’t just hang out with HR people; go hang out with the business people, go hang out with the marketing folks, go hang out with the accounting folks, or make friends with the CFO. I was just on an intro needs assessment for employee listening and the Chief Financial Officer was on that call. I was like, yes this is it.  

I guess what I’m getting to is that you hit on what I think is one of the biggest topics in HR today. Whether we’re talking about employee experience or rewards, it’s about getting out and looking at some of these other business functions and incorporating those into HR. 

Leo: 

Oh yeah. One of the biggest complaints that I hear from HR folks is not having a seat at the table, or not being part of the strategy. And the more that they can position themselves to be great business people, they’ll do exactly what you’ve described. Because everything happens from people and with people, they’re your greatest asset. You can’t produce products obviously without people, and so HR can be an enabler to all parts of the business. From operations to finance, to everything. I mean, nowadays every CFO cares about people—in part because labor costs have gone up—but because they can’t execute their business without having those great people. If HR can understand all the different things and how you make each piece run better, I mean that that’s huge. 

Tom: 

Absolutely. I feel like in the 2010s the CFO was the most transformative role and then in the 2020s I feel like the Chief People Officer or Chief Human Resource officer is really looking like it’s going to be one of the most transformative roles of this decade, as far as having that seat at the table. 

Leo: 

Yeah absolutely. I’m actually liking some of the titles that people are making up for themselves. Like you know, Elon Musk made up a bunch of new titles for himself, but you have the same thing happening in the HR suite. I saw one, Chief of Really Cool People, and a few others I can’t remember but it makes it a little bit more interesting. 

Tom: 

Yeah, I’d love to have one of those on a business cards. But I feel like that’s also tough when you’re posting a job. (laughter) 

It’s like, wait what job is this? 

Leo: 

(Laughs) Yeah, that’s right. 

Tom: 

So, while we’re on this topic—Marketing School—you said HR should be kind of the leading marketer to the people. Tell me a little bit more about what you mean when you say that. 

Leo: 

If you think about the branding space—and I’m going to go off on a little tangent and then circle back—in branding, the adage is you are what your customers say you are, not what you want to be. So, the same thing applies to your people.  

Sometimes companies will say, we want to be an employer of choice. Which I laugh about a little bit because you know, as opposed to what? Well, we don’t want to be mediocre, we don’t want to suck? You could joke in a lot of different ways. But then you say, so what does that mean? In companies, people haven’t necessarily defined that.  

Whether it’s positioned relative to competitors, or more importantly, what is it that they want to offer employees that is going to make them feel that this is the employer of choice. To be able to define that—which I would say is a key part of marketing—you’re defining instead of your brand for the customers—which really should be what your customers actually experience, how they feel about your product, and how they interact with your product—that exact same thing for your people. 

It’s how they experience the workplace, your company, your leadership, your culture, and your total rewards package. And then how do you go about defining it? Because if you want to change it, you first better know where you’re at, and then you could talk about where you’re going. 

Tom: 

I love that. I feel like maybe I’m just really impressionable today, but I’m starting to get this feeling that total rewards might be one of the most important things for organizations to focus on here in 2023. And I’m not trying to lead you there. That’s where my brain is leading me already. Maybe you led me there. 

Leo: 

You know, in my mind, absolutely it’s the most important thing ever. It’s like right below World Peace and climate change (laughter). But I think in practice there are things like culture leadership that generally will have a bigger impact, but total rewards is also the most tangible, so you can’t ignore it. It needs to be a part of the mix. If you’re looking for something to get your arms and head around then total rewards definitely need to be a part of it, because if you can’t do that, you’re going to struggle with some of the other things. 

Tom: 

Yeah, I can absolutely see that. I want to now start going a little bit deeper and before we even do that, I want to talk about Lockton Companies where you work. Tell me a little bit more about that. What is your organization? What are you trying to do? And then we can continue to talk about how you do that in this specter of total rewards and employee experience. 

Leo: 

Yeah, so we do consulting and brokerage in the people solutions space, which is probably an overly lofty name. But really it encompasses total rewards so employee benefits, compensation, retirement, PTO, total rewards value assessments. So, we’re helping companies to rationalize what rewards they offer, what people value, and where they’re wasting money. We also do some HR technology, and then the measurement and management of all of these pieces and employee engagement related to those pieces. 

Tom: 

That’s a lot. You’re right. I mean, if you’re going to call yourself a consultant—I feel like so many people love to call themselves consultants—but when you wear that title, or you label yourself, you have to know a lot of things. You have to be able to connect all these different things into one end goal. So that aligns and it makes sense. You get my seal of approval there. 

Leo: 

Thank you, appreciate it. 

Tom: 

I know that’s why you’re here today. (laughter) 

Leo: 

Well, I spent many years on the corporate side, on the operations side you know, running stuff and dealing with this, so it’s fun to be on the other end now. 

Tom: 

Yeah, so as you know, this is called All About HR, so I’m curious. How did you get to an HR-focused place with your career in your business and where you’re at right now? You didn’t come up as an HR generalist, but you’re here. How’d you get there? 

Leo: 

Oh boy, people may just tune out after they hear this. I started my career in actuarial consulting so I did things like statistical analysis and all that stuff for an actuarial consulting firm. Then I did various health plans, integrated healthcare delivery systems, and stuff like that. So, I never really wanted to be in this space but then a friend of mine talked me into it 12 years ago and I came over. 

I ran a 2 1/2-billion-dollar P&L for a division of a large healthcare organization. And so, I had to deal with a lot of these challenges on the ground and worked with HR as well. Then it’s been a lot of fun to be able to flip it around, but my transition came from what I described into employee benefits and then broadened my focus. 

Tom: 

That perfect. This comes out in almost every person I speak with. I think I’ve had two guests out of 27 now that said, “Oh yeah, I knew I was going into HR and that’s where I was headed. I want to support HR. I want to be in HR.” I always like to ask that. Thank you for sharing.  

Let’s talk about some of that consulting, connecting the dots, and the economies where we’re at today. Everybody’s got an opinion. Where do you see the economy right now? And how do you see that affecting HR organizations and how they approach total rewards? 

Leo: 

Yeah, we’re in a very interesting spot, an inflection point where we’ve come off the hottest labor market that anyone working today has ever experienced. It was crazy out there. The focus was recruit, recruit, recruit. There was Great Resignation in every headline you can imagine. Salaries jumped, benefits were thrown at people, and now we have this lingering recession. People argue, mild, heavy, whatever.  

We have some companies—primarily tech focused—announcing layoffs. So, you have this bifurcated economy and job market where you have some that are very much in the cost cutting stage or at the very least a lot of companies that have become very cost conscious, where before much less so.  

Then you have a very large sector of the economy that’s actually still focused on running their businesses as-is, but they’ve turned a little bit where the focus isn’t as much recruiting. Their focus is on their own employees and how do they effectively engage the people that they have. Certainly, they need to bring new people on, but it’s this kind of mix between focusing on the talent that you have and focusing on the financials in practice. Obviously, most companies are a blend of the two. 

Tom: 

Yeah, it’s interesting. The number of organizations I speak with that are saying, “Oh, we’re focused on retention” or “we’re focused on onboarding.” So many organizations are focused on one piece, but that piece is going to turn into the other piece, and I think it’s imperative for organizations to focus on all of it.  

We just came out of the “what are the trends for 2023 going to be?” And then you look back and I know what they’re going to be. Let’s see, last year everyone was like, “Oh, we need talent. We need to get people on board.” Guess what it is this year? It’s engagement. It’s keeping your best talent. It’s upskilling the people that you have. It’s cyclical and you do need to be aware of all these different pieces.  

And you’re right, we are seeing a split of two groups. You see the headlines. Hiring is going down. This is going down. The economy is going down. But when you actually look at the data, it really does split. A lot of the organizations are business as usual. A lot of the small mid-sized businesses are really thriving with growth as some of the control from a wage perspective starts rolling back. Some demographic areas are growing. So, I think that’s a really important point that you make right off the bat, which is you can’t just go off the headline. 

Leo: 

Absolutely. So, my joke about averages is it means that you’re wrong 100% of the time. You’re either too high or too low, and so that’s the problem with trends. To your point, no one just stops just doing one area and says, “Oh, that was last year.” You have to manage all the pieces, but in practice you do flex to the economic environment and to the labor environment, so we still have really low unemployment. 

Sixty percent of CEO’s are saying they’re not planning on any form of downsizing. There is probably, I forget the number, twenty to thirty percent that are just considering downsizing. It’s a relatively small portion that are actually looking at layoffs. This is that blending that we’re talking about. Where before I do think, there were very few companies that really had a healthy focus in managing the financials of their total rewards package alongside the actual engagement portion and recruiting because of the environment. So, I actually think it’s healthy to see a blend. 

Tom: 

A blend is always good. An average is always wrong. Alright, good, I like this. 

Leo: 

That’s right. 

Tom: 

We’re going to take a quick break and then we’re going to jump back in. I want to talk and pick your brain more about how do you support both of those different groups and how they might look at total rewards differently. We’ll be right back in just a moment.  

. . . 

All right, we are here for the HR Hot Sauce with Leo. Leo, are you ready? 

Leo: 

I’m ready. 

Tom: 

What is the best job you’ve ever had? 

Leo: 

My current one. And I’m not saying that because I think someone I work with is listening. 

Tom: 

What’s one phrase at work that drives you nuts? 

Leo: 

“Let’s discuss.” Way too ambiguous for me. 

Tom: 

Do you like working on rainy or sunny days? 

Leo: 

I would say rainy, but during COVID I spent a little time looking at the water in Mexico and I really enjoyed working on some of those sunny days, so it’s kind of split down the middle. 

Tom: 

I’ll take it. How can someone make your day at work? 

Leo: 

I would say just coming in and checking in, in a genuine way. Everyone’s just busy, focused on what’s next, what needs to get done, problems. When someone pops in and just says, hey, just wanted to see how you’re doing or say hi, whatever it is, that’s awesome. It’s the personal connection. 

Tom: 

I love it. Best useless skill? 

Leo: 

I don’t know about a useless skill, but I would say it’s a useless superpower. My ears do not get cold. My wife makes fun of me that I don’t ever wear a hat. Regardless of how cold it is, my ears always do great. 

Tom: 

That qualifies. Accepted. 

Mild, medium, hot or nuclear? 

Leo: 

I would say hot. I definitely like it pretty spicy. Thai hot, short of nuclear. 

Tom: 

Favorite interview question to ask or be asked? 

Leo: 

Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Convicted, no. That’s right. It always makes people pause a little bit. 

Tom: 

Favorite song to bring you out of a funk? 

Leo: 

I would say listening to Coldplay. It’s just any song, just good mood music. 

Tom: 

Let’s get back to the show.  

. . . 

Alright, we are back. Leo was talking the economy, total rewards, and employee experience. I’m buying what he’s selling so far. But now I want to test him here, I want go another layer deeper.  

You talked about how there’s two groups really in today’s economy right now that I’m sure we can get really granular and make that 10 groups, but two real groups. The groups that are kind of tightening it down and looking at costs, really taking a more focused and cautious approach. And other organizations that are more business as usual. How do you support or how do you approach from a consultative end these two totally different groups that are starting to split in our in our economy today? 

Leo: 

You have to get deep on some of the tactics specific to each area, but recognize that they do blend together like our prior discussion. I’ll start with cost and there’s a spillover into talent and move into that. So, the first part with cost is you just simply have to assess where you’re spending your money. Do you have a good accounting? Comp? The different types of benefits that you offer because obviously we’ve had a proliferation of benefits over the past several years. And do you have a good understanding?  

Within that you could actually do pretty good deep dives of where for the finance folks, I’ll say, you can recapture lost cash flow. You’re wasting money. Benefits is a great, tangible place to look. For example, in your healthcare spend, almost every case that I look at, there’s inefficiencies in how they’re approaching their medical spend, their provider networks, their pharmacy spend, and much more specific areas like complex claims management. That’s getting a little bit in the weeds, but you start to break apart all of your pieces of spend and either you or you get some help, and you do assessments and say if I didn’t have constraints, what would be the optimum? Where could I save money without pushing it back on my employees? I don’t want to screw my people. That’s not what we’re talking about here.  

The second part, aside from doing that deep dive into each of those areas, is simply understanding can you deploy dollars that are not valued? So do you have an understanding of what your people actually value? There’s a danger in saying what your people value because your people are not a homogeneous group. We could talk about this more but you’ve got to break it up into segments. Can you break up the needs, values, trade-offs of different populations? And honestly some people just don’t care about stuff. I’ve worked with companies where their employee population does not really care about employee benefits. The best thing that you could do is cut benefits off for them to ‘good enough’ and redeploy it into compensation. That’s a very simple example, but there’s other ways to approach that. 

Tom: 

And give them jeans and Hawaiian shirt Friday. And you’re off to the races, right? 

Leo: 

You know what? I’m actually glad that you brought that up. I’m just going to give you an example where a company was trying to influence where people sought their healthcare services. It was saying if you go to a less costly place, we’ll give you money. We’ll give you a bunch of money, $500,000 bucks. They didn’t get much uptake. They flipped it and said we’re going to give you PTO. You bring in that you went to the right place, same thing. You know, dollars a dollar, it’s just paid out in different ways. All of a sudden, huge uptake. People all of a sudden start to pay attention to where they seek healthcare services because they value PTO. The money, for whatever reason, felt more intangible to them. I wouldn’t have guessed that, and I’m not saying that I came up with it. This is the knowing your population, knowing what they value.  

Then when you look at the focus on talent, that’s really where you need to go. You move from just benchmarking, because you’re wrong 100% of the time and it’s a rear-view mirror look. Just simply reading articles and saying, “Oh my God, I have to offer lifestyle spending accounts because everyone is doing it” or whatever the latest widget is. To actually figuring out what is important to your people, how do they make trade-offs, and what you are doing for different segments. Then you can make better decisions on how to connect with them. That was a lot. 

Tom: 

Yeah, but it is really insightful and I think it’s pretty easy to follow as well. You said my favorite thing I’ve heard, which is that benchmarks are always wrong. I’m a very anti benchmark guy and I always have to tiptoe around that because people love benchmarks. They just love them. In my eyes, at the end of the day it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down at best. At best that’s what you get. And you’re going to spend a bunch of money and it’s either too broad to matter or too tight to have the depth to matter either way. So anyways, I don’t get to say that very often at work, so this is nice. 

Leo: 

I’ve just come to deal with it is a necessity because people in other functions, whether CFO, COO, whatever they want to see it. It’s a ‘check the box’ or are we in the mix with other companies? Are we missing anything glaring? Those kinds of things. I get it so it’s what I call necessary, but not sufficient. 

Tom: 

So, I know how I would go about answering this question and I’m curious how you do it. Sounds like you need to know your employees very well to be able to execute what you’re talking about. Or at least have an idea of groups of employees, or at least do some testing. How do you go about understanding what those employees value? Where do you get that? 

Leo: 

Yeah, so the theme of this—and I’m just trying to be a little prickly for effect—but the theme of the talk should be Why Satisfaction Surveys Suck. If you ask people whether they are satisfied, the answer is just “no”, right? When you ask, “are you satisfied?” the answer is going to be, “No, I want more.” What you should be asking are other things. Satisfaction is fine if coupled with other things. You need to understand satisfaction relative to expectations.  

What’s the importance that they place on whatever it is that you’re measuring? Also, what’s their familiarity with what you’re measuring? You may find that people just don’t know about stuff which is actually very often the case because of the proliferation of benefits. And then you have to understand how they make tradeoffs. Not just how do I look at one thing, but how do I compare A versus B versus C and so on. Because my decisions aren’t really made in a vacuum of an individual benefit. It’s like hey, do I want more money, or do I want more benefits? Or do you want more of this benefit or that and so on. 

And then lastly, ideally, you’re connecting it to some form of outcome like loyalty, or likelihood to recommend. Some people or companies use employee Net Promoter score, not going to get into whether it’s good or bad, but that at least gives you one indication as you’re measuring all this other stuff. 

Tom: 

I’ll say it’s bad. 

Leo: 

Okay, we can go with that. But it’s just simple and at least it’s one connection to likelihood to stay. 

Tom: 

Yeah, in my space we talk about employee engagement all the time, and employee engagement is an indicator. It’s not a final destination. I’ve talked to folks who reference the Gallup 12 and ask, “Why do you have 40 questions in your engagement survey? You just need to know these 12 things.” Yeah like that’s an outcome, yes, that’s engagement but what’s driving that and what’s driving that for this demographic group? Are your executives what drives their engagement? What are the key drivers of that and how do you connect to those key drivers to get to that engagement? And I feel like in a lot of the data we see, it’s that connection that you build with the drivers that matters more than the actual engagement because the engagement isn’t an actual destination. It gives you a platform.  

There’s a lot of things that are connected to engagement, and I think it’s very similar to satisfaction. I think satisfaction evolved into engagement for at least a lot of people. We can parse terms there, but I like a lot of what you’re saying. It makes a lot of sense to me. 

Leo: 

What you’re describing with engagement, that process that you talked about is really the same thing in assessing total rewards and what people value. So, you need to figure out the drivers and you do that by understanding those pieces. Satisfaction relative to expectations and importance, familiarity and then how individuals make tradeoffs. 

Tom: 

I never knew how much connection there was between what I talk about every day and total rewards. It’s like sitting next to somebody at the end of a flight and you talk to him and you’re like, “Wait, we went to college together? I’ve been sitting here not talking to you for the whole 5 hours flying into New York. Now we’re getting off the plane and I’m just finding this out.” That’s what it feels like listening to these connections, right now, 

So, we took a deep dive into the process with the groups that are financially reevaluating everything. For groups that are focused on recruiting and growth, there’s a little bit more of that marketing HR connection there. Putting themselves out there with the brand, focusing on that culture. How do you approach total rewards a little bit differently to that subset? 

Leo: 

I don’t know if I would approach it differently. I think if you can effectively deal with or have a good EVP for your existing employees, then you are going to be effective in recruiting. I’m going to assume that you either do or should profile your high performers, understand who’s a fit for your organization, and who does well. That becomes the jumping off point for the types of people that you want to bring on.  

So, you have a test tube that you should be taking advantage of with your existing population. Now, I would argue the people that have come to you are the most valuable. You should figure out how to retain those people first and foremost because if you’re losing those people, you’re not going to make it up by having an awesome recruiting process.  

It’s like selling your way out of crappy customer service. If your product is bad, trying to sell more isn’t the right approach. So, you have to have a strong recruiting process, but if you do the things that I’m talking about and you’re effective in engaging your employees. then you’re going to be able to translate that to your recruiting process. What if during the process you could say, “Hey, look I’m going to give you the names of a few people. Why don’t you talk to them about why they love working here?” Versus me the hiring manager that’s obviously going to give you the pitch about why this is the greatest place. Make them your marketers and you’re going to have great culture. You’ll be that much more successful. I’m not saying that total rewards is the answer to all of these things, it’s just an important component. If you don’t have that, a lot of the other things just don’t come together.  

Tom: 

So, total rewards in summary is that connection between benefits, your culture, and the employee. Or am I close? 

Leo: 

It is a tangible way—I haven’t connected it to culture, but if you are trying to create a certain culture and more broadly I’ll say, an employee value proposition, it should manifest itself in how you deliver total rewards. So, it should all line up. 

Tom: 

Yeah, that’s where I was going with culture. If you’re the kind of organization that cares, that wants it to match, rather than just having this benefit. Culture is a secondary benefit that comes out. Because you don’t do those things if you don’t care about culture. And when you do ask people, and you do try to make sure they’re getting the best out of the benefits and not just giving them benefits, they feel it. It just creates a better culture. It’s a better perception for the employee and for the company. That’s where I think it’s culture. You can’t force it, but I think naturally thinking and going through it this way does develop culture. As you defined it, your culture isn’t what you say it is, it’s how people react to what you do and that’s where I’m connecting. 

Leo: 

I see, I get your point. Yep, I would totally agree. Yeah, but you know, there’s an interesting discussion—not that I’ll go deep into this—but organizations that don’t want to have a strong total rewards package, maybe they want to focus on other things in professional development or whatever the case is, that’s okay because you’re being honest about it. If you’re honest about that with your employees, and you’re clear about how you guys connect, that’s great as well.  

I’ve heard someone say the definition of a good strategy is deciding what you’re not going to do. If that’s not an area you’re going to be strong in, hey awesome, then you’re just that much more clear and honest about what where you want to focus. One of the things that employees are starting to want the most is transparency. 

Tom: 

I don’t think we can end on a better note than that. I think that’s it. That was fantastic. That was a master class for me, at least in getting started and trying to figure out total rewards. And honestly, I learned about culture, learned a little bit about engagement, and employee experience. This has been a great conversation, Leo. 

Leo: 

Thanks Tom, appreciate it. I had fun. 

Tom: 

Where can we find you? Where can our listeners find you locked in? Are you out on social? Do you have a company web page? I’ll put all these in the notes. Do you have YouTube? 

Leo: 

So, I’ll share with you on my LinkedIn page. You can find me on LinkedIn by my name, Leo Tokar. If you want to e-mail me, it’s my name with a dot, so leo.tokar@lockton.com. I’m actually going to be coming out with a YouTube channel that is called Breaking Bad Rewards. We should be coming out with it in the next month, but we’ll cover topics like this. We’ll get deeper into some areas of like benefits and other things, and so hopefully just be a place to talk about things like this a little bit more. 

Tom: 

Excellent. 

Well, we’ll share all that information. I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to record with me and look forward to seeing you around Denver. 

Leo: 

Definitely. Hopefully the snow will melt soon, and it will warm up, but thanks for having me.  

Tom: 

Yeah, it’s supposed to snow and melt the next day. It’s not been that case for last month so hopefully that turns.  

Alright everybody, thank you very much for joining us for All About HR. Hope you have a fantastic week. I’ve learned a ton. Hopefully you did as well. We’ll see you back to learn more all about HR. Take care. 

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Understand, engage, inspire and retain your people like never before. People Element’s employee experience and engagement solution delivers powerful intelligence, giving you the confidence to act. To learn how you can gain a better understanding of your employees, please visit us at peopleelement.com.