Level: Senior HR/reward professionals.
Date: 25-26 June 2025; 15-16 October 2025.
Location: Your PC via Zoom.
Duration: 1.5 days: Day 1: 9am-4.pm; Day 2: 9am-1pm (UK).
Format: Intensive & highly-participative workshop.
Fed by the latest research findings & recent case studies.
Mix of high-level, confidential discussions.
Individual & groups exercises: application of planning tools & methods provided to your situation.
Fees: £995 + VAT per delegate.
Brochure: Click here
‘Our reward strategy? Deal with the next crisis!’ – HR Director, public sector body.
‘All that hopey changey stuff’ – Former US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Global pandemic. The great resignation and extensive, continuing skill shortages giving us a contemporary ‘cost/talent crunch’. A cost-of-living crisis and explosion in financial un-wellness, in-work poverty and mental ill-health. A new Labour government giving us a decade’s worth of employment legislation to deal with in one act; and an escalating National Living Wage alongside of a re-invigorated trade union movement seeking pay ‘restoration’ and ‘payback’. Reward professionals have certainly become proficient at rapidly responding to these ‘polycrises’ in the 2020s, many of which have fundamentally shifted our perspective on everything rewards-wise – from pay progression and sick pay to executive incentives, and from flexible working to corporate wellbeing programmes. Health and wellbeing continues to be a major challenge, never mind re-engaging the UK workforce which still displays both low productivity and low employee engagement levels by historic and international standards. And while many of our websites still refer optimistically to their ’total rewards’, most employees are definitely not feeling ‘totally rewarded’ right now.
These changes have placed the HR function in a prominent position, with pay and rewards at the centre of many corporate agendas. Reward professionals have become ever more crucial. A CIPD publication, People Expertise on Corporate Boards, highlights the growing strategic focus on people and reward issues. But are we up to the challenge?
While many have done a fabulous job in responding to this run of crises, they have intensified the dilemmas that Duncan identified originally while researching for his PhD on reward strategy thinking and practice. Possessing a reward strategy has become ‘best practice’ for any self-respecting contemporary reward or HR director. To not have what Armstrong and Brown in their Handbook of Reward Management Practice (Kogan Page 2019) define as this ‘declaration of intent as to what the organisation wants to do in the future . . . reward practices aligned with the business strategy’ they observe, could be regarded now as a ‘career-limiting position’.
In theory, it makes huge sense: develop your people strategy and total rewards package to recruit, retain and motivate the people who are best able to deliver your organisation’s purpose and strategy, thereby ‘enhancing performance and securing competitive advantage’. The reality, as Professor Jonathan Trevor points out in Can Pay be Strategic? (Palgrave MacMillan 2011), is that it is often fiendishly difficult to implement your strategy in practice. It’s far from plain sailing when working on complex plan designs and processes across a de-globalising and unstable geo-political world and internally with stressed-out line mangers in the busy realities of organisational life. So as Trevor notes, in many organisations, rather than based on strategically differentiated and innovative approaches, pay and reward practices are more likely to be benchmarked and copied from other employers.
And any new initiatives risk being, as one participant characterised their approach to introducing a raft of new wellness benefits over the past two years, like ‘throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of its sticks’. So what’s the point then of ‘the hopey changey stuff’? As the CIPD notes in its annual reward survey, while employers may:
‘recognise that work, the workforce and the workplace has changed massively in a relatively short space of time, as they’ve been so busy dealing with the day-to-day people consequences, they haven’t had time to reflect on what the implications of this new reality mean for how they could – or should – reward and recognise employee contributions.’
So there is great value now in employers and HR and reward leaders undertaking a speedy but strategic, systematic review of their employment and reward practices, whatever and especially because of the immediate pressures on them. And this E-reward workshop is designed to provide a practical framework that Duncan has developed over many years of reward researching and consultancy, a four-phased process, to help you to do that, however tough the immediate reward and resourcing issues you face. To come up with a coherent and sustainable rewards plan and strategic direction, aligned with your purpose and values, that you can actually deliver into practice with demonstrable impact.
What pay and reward strategy do you need moving forward to recruit, retain and engage your people so as to simultaneously meet the needs of your business leaders seeking cost efficiency and recovery in productivity and employee engagement levels; an increasingly demanding, diverse and vocal workforce; while still being responsive to an increasingly unstable outside world and an increasingly interventionist government and employment law framework?
That’s what this programme is designed to support you in doing. E-reward’s intensive strategic 1.5-day workshop is targeted at HR and reward leaders and senior professionals who are responsible for strategic reward issues. Day 1 focuses on key pay and rewards trends, issues and responses, followed by an intensive half-day’s planning and working on your own reward strategy. We are confident that it offers you a unique combination of expert learning and experience sharing with practical action planning.
Come and learn, discuss and debate with other reward leaders how you can make this happen.
This reward leaders’ executive masterclass is highly participative and includes a mix of high-level, confidential discussions and activities and exercises that will enable you to reflect on current leading thinking and practice, explore new approaches and especially on Day 2, plan out your own reward futures. Participants will review contemporary issues in reward, consider their own and relevant case-study situations and experiences, and benefit from Duncan’s extensive reward consulting and research experience.
- How to construct and adapt an appropriate reward strategy and secure board-level support and commitment for it.
- How to implement your reward strategy over time and deal with common delivery issues – line management capability, employee communications, HR information system issues.
- How to determine and prioritise the components of your reward strategy and total rewards package and integrate this as part of your wider workforce and people strategy.
- How to select appropriate metrics to evaluate and adapt your pay and reward strategy over time so as to keep it up-to-date and impactful.
Led by Dr Duncan Brown and benefitting from the latest research findings, the programme is designed to:
- Provide a confidential and expert retreat to review and discuss the challenges surrounding the development and implementation of your reward strategy, in the context of your business strategy and the current economic, social, political and legal context.
- Illustrate how successful reward strategies are developed and delivered in today’s challenging conditions; what do they look like in practice? What priorities do you need to focus on? How do you secure adequate resources for them in the current climate? How do you assess and demonstrate their effectiveness?
Discuss the latest trends and developments in pay and reward thinking and practice, profiling both recent academic research in the field and illustrated with topical current case studies.
Here’s what Duncan says:
‘A big benefit is being forced to step back from daily pressures to think about the key strategic issues of the day and more specifically the lateral integration of reward initiatives with each other and with the rest of the HR strategy – i.e. more than just the vertical alignment with the business strategy. We have often ended up too talking a lot about alignment with culture and values in the organisation.
The other aspect course participants have found most beneficial are the discussions on communications and line managers. Comms was seen as part of a wider move to simplify and demystify rewards to build greater transparency and understanding and more clearly see the links between what the business needs, its values and what employees do and how they are rewarded.
Our last set of course participants were all finding in their very different settings that values-based reward and performance management receive far more traction with employees than traditional objective and results-driven rewards. Hence they were using EVP and employee experience concepts more than traditional total rewards thinking. And financial wellbeing has been raised and discussed extensively in every group I think.
They also liked the emphasis on using reward strategy to prioritise and focus their activity when they have such huge agendas.’
E-reward’s intensive executive programme is targeted at senior HR and reward colleagues who are responsible for strategic reward issues:
Reward/Compensation & Benefits Directors
Heads of Reward
HR Directors
Reward/HR Managers
There is no exam or qualification awarded.
‘Great course which has provided me with lots of tools and information on reward strategy.’
‘I want to say thank you for a really interesting and useful training session. The material that Duncan put together and his expertise was fantastic. It has definitely given me some ideas about how to manage reward in my organisation and an understanding of how to look at the bigger picture and strategy to keep it aligned. A huge learning experience for me, thank you for putting this together and thank you to Duncan.’
‘I found the course really helpful and gave me a lot to work with. I’ve attended events with Duncan before and he is really engaging and a great facilitator.’
‘Whether you are preparing to form your reward strategy or need to refresh and realign it, this course is a must that will leave you with plenty to consider and inspire to progress.’
‘Very thought provoking and giving a holistic view on reward practices. An interactive masterclass that I would recommend.’
‘If you are procrastinating on developing a coherent approach to reward because of confusion over the questions to ask/pose, this workshop gives you an excellent platform/impetus to take this important issue forward.’
‘A brilliant way of reflecting on and developing your reward strategy and practice.’
‘Really valuable session bringing together loads of thinking in this critical area and lots to go away and think about and put into action.’
‘If you need to gain a deeper and broader understanding of reward strategies and issues then this course is a must.’
‘Great workshop for reward specialists and those with a strategic reward role.’
£995.00 GBP (+ VAT) per delegate.
Each ticket covers attendance for one person only for the duration of this 1.5-day virtual programme and includes PDF course materials emailed to you in advance of the class.
Please read our terms and conditions carefully as they contain important information.
This executive class will be facilitated by Dr Duncan Brown, an independent reward researcher and adviser, Senior Associate at the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and Visiting Professor at University of Greenwich. Duncan is a former employee reward practice leader at Willis Towers Watson, PwC and Aon Hewitt, who spent five years as the Deputy CEO at the CIPD.
He is a highly regarded adviser and writer on reward management, including jointly authoring with Michael Armstrong the best-selling Handbook of Reward Management Practice and Reward Strategy. His doctorate was in reward strategy.
Live streamed via Zoom.
| Virtual classroom | 25/06/2025 - 26/06/2025 |
| Virtual classroom | 15/10/2025 - 16/10/2025 |
Please read our terms and conditions carefully as they contain important information.