Government Business

Pay and benefit packages play a key role in attracting, retaining and motivating staff. But how employers communicate these rewards is just as important as the actual pay and benefits. Get the communication wrong and they will not be valued.

Total reward statements
The Cabinet Office has recommended that public sector bodies should consider introducing total reward statements as a means of communicating and reinforcing the value of benefits provided by employers to their staff. The statements, which can be provided online or in hard copy, place a value on a range of benefits including voluntary benefits.
    
Hertfordshire County Council is one of three big local authorities that have formed an innovative partnership to introduce total reward statements for their workforces, totalling over 60,000 people.
    
Together with Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire County Councils, they are working with flexible benefits provider Vebnet to pilot a scheme in September and October, prior to a possible wider roll out to staff if successful.

Communicating the benefits
All three councils recognise the importance of communicating the value of their total pay and benefits to their staff. Public sector pay awards are currently below inflation levels and the annual pay rise for council workers is still not agreed but is likely to be well below three per cent. This makes it even more important that employees in the public sector really do understand the financial value of all the benefits they’re receiving – such as a final salary pension scheme, generous paid holiday and flexible working. These benefits often tend to be better than those on offer in the private sector.
    
Total reward statements help to increase the visibility of all available benefits and help to sell each council as a great employer. It is, however, important to also tailor the benefits, particularity the voluntary ones to meet employee requirements and support the values of the council. Faced with national and local skills shortages in critical roles like social workers, planners and engineers, we need all the help we can get to show the complete picture of what is on offer to local government employees.

Work-life balance incentive
Hertfordshire County Council already has a range of contractual and voluntary benefits in place that are promoted via the council’s ‘Balance’ strategy and are accessible via the intranet. This covers flexible working, health, and support for parents and carers. The philosophy behind this is that work is an activity and not a place. The council believes that helping employees achieve a good work-life balance can improve performance, and it provides access to a range of flexible working opportunities to help them do this.
    
While pay is not always as competitive to jobs in the private sector the council does work hard to look for other ways to help employees financially, for example we offer access to discounted healthcare, dental treatment and eye care. We also offer discounts at many leisure centres and fitness clubs across the county as well as a salary sacrifice cycle scheme.
    
In addition to flexible working, staff with caring responsibilities outside work can access real support to help them combine their work and care commitments. This includes paid time off to carers to attend external support groups, a Carers Group that meets regularly to provide support, and paid emergency leave for sudden or unexpected emergencies involving their cared for person and to make long term plans if necessary. Carers are also able to take an extra 20 days unpaid leave per year. Also on offer are Childcare Vouchers via a salary sacrifice scheme.

Empowering staff
Total reward statements is seen very much as complementing employee self service, which all three councils have implemented, or are rolling out, for online information and routine transactions like changing personal details, booking holiday or accessing payslips. Both this way of working and the total reward statements empower staff by giving them access to the information about themselves and their job.
    
Many organisations have used self-service and total rewards as a stepping stone to introduce flexible benefits schemes where employees can choose the range of benefits that suit their individual work and life circumstances. The workforce demographics in the public sector make these sorts of choices important for staff – not everyone will have the same needs, what is important to one person may not be important to another. Take maternity leave as an example, not everyone will have a child so they want to know about what benefits are available for them.   
    
Hertfordshire County Council, with 30,000 staff, has a predominantly female and part-time workforce – over 75 per cent of staff already make use of flexible working in some form or other and feedback from staff surveys confirms that this is highly valued. Around 35 per cent of staff have said that they have caring responsibilities outside work and we expect to see this rise as elder care increases. Over 30 per cent of the workforce are aged over 50 and they may have different benefit requirements to younger workers.     

Nurturing the right people
Maintaining and further improving our services to our local communities depends on having the right people in place. The statements are just one element of our ongoing reward strategy to help recruit, retain and motivate the best people.
    
Total reward statements are a helpful tool in communicating pay and benefits and help employees see the value of such packages. In these challenging financial times we need to make maximum use of all the tools at our disposal to ensure that our people understand the full value of their employment package and choose to stay with Hertfordshire County Council for the longer term.

Louise Harrington is part of the national working group of the PPMA (Public Sector People Manager’s Association) for pay and workforce issues and assistant director of HR at Hertfordshire County Council.