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Meeting Details
Contents
Performance Management Discussion. 5
The AI Discussion Continued. 7
Voice of the CHRO - Ana White, CHRO at Lumen Technologies. 7
Hot Topics & Takeaways
We kicked off the meeting with a speed round of hot topics, questions and discussion requests. Members expressed that they would like to potentially implement an “open mic” period at the beginning of every meeting, during which leaders can discuss topics and function-related challenges that are top of mind. Topics of interest for March included the following:
- Non-Cash Recognition
- Some leaders shared that they are in the process of reimaging their rewards programs. A common challenge was thinking about how programs could be made more flexible and customized to various regions. Many shared that shipping costs can be prohibitive to sending recognition gifts. Some have found more Amazon-like vendors to help.
- Key question: How do you create a more centralized approach with some allowance for localized flexibility?
- Skills and Job Mapping
- One member shared that their organization is currently debating whether they should map skills to compensation. They want to unlock more internal mobility and recently launched an opportunity marketplace. The initiative is currently being led by the talent team. Board members were prompted to share what they are doing in this space. A couple members mentioned that they were exploring working with the vendor TechWolf.
There's a consensus that focusing too much on skills can be dangerous, especially if you don't know how your company is evaluating skills. Most TR leaders are trying to stiff arm the conversation around compensation currently. Many TR leaders are facing questions and pressures from business leaders about skills and recognizing those skills.
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- Key questions:
- Are leaders considering attaching compensation to this system?
- What problems are you trying to solve for?
- Is it that a lot of jobs are expected to go away in the next several years?
- Next Steps: TR Board leadership will organize for the TA Board and the TR Board to have a joint meeting to discuss this topic and promote a sharing of the minds. We will also consider having TR members bring their talent partner to a future meeting.
- Key questions:
- Total Rewards Strategy
- Leaders shared whether or not they have created specific total rewards strategies at their organizations. While some connect their respective strategy to enterprise and HR strategies, others shared that they simply have a compensation strategy (rather than a total rewards strategy).
2025 Priorities
Board members took part in a discussion about how they would like to move forward in sharing their respective priorities and whether they would like them to be tracked in an online database. Members expressed that there have been issues in the past with logging into the Smartsheet, so they didn’t use it much. They also recognized that priorities change frequently and there's not a huge amount of time to update a chart. One of the challenges on the back end is that we want this information to be secure but that can make it hard to access. TR leadership is considering making it a simple link on the i4cp TR page.
Action Items:
- Members are encouraged to send a quick email with a rundown of their priorities, which Amber will then aggregate and publish. We will put them up at the start of the meetings to ground the conversations and ask if anything has changed.
Purpose of the Board
The session was guided by a series of key questions to help reset the purpose and vision of the board. Answers are included below.
What do you find most valuable from this board?
- Opportunity to learn from each other
- Raise your gaze
- Confidential discussion
- Finding out what other people are doing and being able to report back to leaders. Nice that it's not just their industry
- Current and peer best practices
- Better when there's not a direct competitor in the room
- The one place where they feel the most comfortable with being transparent with other practitioners
What do you want to see more of and less of?
- Expect to see a robust and ongoing dialogue. There’s a desire for people to be more participatory and vocal and for everyone to be present at meetings if they are part of the board. Wants i4cp to be more explicit about attendance policy.
- It would be helpful to know everyone's schedule so members can better schedule meetings. Pete suggested that we propose meeting dates and then ask for feedback on meeting times and dates.
- There is some friction between being on a board and not having total access to the research. Some members need to be able to explain to leadership what value they're getting out of their board membership.
- More updated resources on the TR Board page.
Where do we want to shift our interest to in terms of topics?
- There's an interest in talking more about benefits and health care.
- Ok with i4cp sharing data if there's time for follow up discussion.
- Members would like to better leverage the i4cp brand to get more external speakers. This would encourage people to elevate and raise their gaze. Sometime the board gets too much into the technical. Needs more thought leaders and some academics. Someone like an expert on GLP-1s, or someone from American Heart Association for example. Doesn't always have to be total rewards specific but needs to relate it.
- Interest in hearing more people that are domain experts in total rewards and well-being.
- Request to leave space for hot topic conversations at the beginning of each meeting as time allows.
Peer Mentor Session 1
Stephanie Reed, Total Rewards Director, SLB
Stephanie Reed shared about SLB’s Benefits Review Process. The company needed a benefits review process that was much lighter and agile. The team started its new review process with Brazil and UK and partnered with Aon. They facilitated a benefits deep dive where they identified gaps and areas for improvement based on prior experience and competitive benchmarking. This process enables them to get a better feel for what's important in that location and how that might influence what's important for the benefits. SLB reports back its finding afterwards and they share their conclusion with regional stakeholders.
- Key question for board members: How do you keep up with your global landscape and ensure you're providing a decent level of benefits?
Peer Mentor Session 2
Viren Ohol, VP, Global Total Rewards, Avnet
Viren Ohol shared more about Avnet’s Job Architecture Review and asked members for input from board members.
A bit of background: Avnet is a semiconductor distributor. The workforce is split equally between three regions. The workforce is largely sales, and supply chain, and the supporting functions. Originally a job architecture project was revamped in 2021 but not fully executed. Viren’s team has been tasked with reviewing the job architecture and recommending a path forward without incurring a ton of costs.
- The purpose of Avnet’s Job Architecture Review:
- To align to their total rewards philosophy.
- Partnership in building the foundation for the future to solve current biz challenges, support talent engagement, and make informed pay decisions.
- Build Trust - Provide transparency and education.
- Prepare for legislative changes around the globe.
- The goal:
- Looking to resolve issues with having too many job levels. They want the jobs to be uniform globally without as much variance in the role and compensation range. The plan is to collapse the job families and then remap all the job grades and compensation ranges.
Performance Management Discussion
Members joined in a collaborative conversation about performance management guided by the following questions:
- What changes are you considering to your performance management program?
- What are the main areas of focus for performance management?
- What challenges are you seeing in your performance management approach?
- How does your performance management system intersect with compensation?
- Who in your business is the owner (or co-owner of performance management?
Takeaways:
- Many organizations nest performance management under talent. It's assumed by the company that TR owns PM, but that's false and there can be a disconnect with the talent organization. The sentiment is that it’s a little bit of the wild west now.
- Two members mentioned that they have gotten rid of performance ratings.
- Bonuses remain a proxy for performance at some companies.
- Some companies just have comp guidelines rather than rating distribution guidelines. Consensus is that you should provide both.
- There is a sentiment that talent is not taking this as seriously as they should. Some feel PM should be more prescriptive and owned by TR.
Key questions:
- How can you get more transparent about pay if you're not transparent about how you are evaluating them?
- Who is good at managing out poor performers? Peer Mentor Session 3
Peer Mentor Session 3
Kelley Elliott, VP, Total Rewards, Delta Air Lines
Kelley Elliott kicked off a conversation about pay transparency and Delta’s plans to share narrow salary ranges internally. Ninety percent of employees are frontline employees. Most are on a pay scale and have transparency into total comp. Now Kelley’s team is considering how far they should go in showing their 10,000 (merit-based) employees where they fall in this pay structure. Currently, Delta shows the wide pay range in the regional areas that they have to share pay range externally. The question at hand is whether to publish internally? (Which will inevitably be published externally).
Currently employees do not know what group they are in. They just know what pay level they are in. Proposing that this year they see what group they're in and what their pay range is. Leaders saw it as a part of the merit conversation last year but they struggled to have the conversation. The plan is to flip to sharing the more narrow ranges.
Kelley asked for thoughts on going about sharing narrow pay range to employees, including things to consider and what questions to anticipate. Members offered the following suggestions:
- Evaluate the degree of readiness among your people leaders. The challenge is getting leaders ready for the conversations about why people are in the ranges they're in. The leader education piece is the most important piece of this effort.
- Encourage employees to reach out and ask if they want to know their pay range.
- Start conservatively.
Voice from DC
Ani Huang, Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Content Officer, HR Policy Association | President and CEO, Center On Executive Compensation
Ani Huang joined by video call to discuss current legal risk and DEI strategies following President Trump’s Executive Orders.
Please find the full presentation in downloads.
The AI Discussion Continued
The board picked back up the conversation about AI from the February meeting. Members shared questions, use cases, and ways in which they are experimenting with GenAI.
Several leaders shared that they are using Copilot for emails and crafting tough messages. Some are also using it for writing performance reviews. Members noted that there are not as many use cases specifically for how to use it for TR, but some have used it for job descriptions and general policy summaries and FAQs.
One member is exploring AI possibilities to help manage benefits to ensure that global benefits are up to par across the board, while another is piloting a GenAI powered platform that helps managers have tough conversations.
Some leaders feel like they're getting bombarded by existing vendors with AI solutions that they then need to evaluate for effectiveness. There's also the risk of having a piece meal approach and a lot of different AI tools and vendors across the organization.
Many TR leaders feel HR remains a low priority when it comes to AI tools. They're deploying tools across the business but sometimes it's hard to make the budget case for HR. Many are being charged with the goal of using AI more but not being given the budget. Most members agreed that we are still in the “spaghetti on the wall” phase.
Voice of the CHRO - Ana White, CHRO at Lumen Technologies
Ana White sat down with the TR board in a Q&A session moderated by Pete to share how she collaborates with TR. Responses below have been paraphrased for brevity.
- What do you look for in your TR leaders? Integrity, transparency, courage, conviction, and collaboration. TR is best when partnering with all the functions in HR. Deep business acumen is also important, and understanding next practices goes a long way in determining the best rewards for an organization.
- How should TR best collaborate? TR should collaborate across the organization but working well with TA is paramount so that TA is telling the right employee value proposition. HRBPs also need to deeply understand TR in the right way. There should be alignment between the two so that they represent one HR.
- Have you done anything in particular to aid with these partnerships? Lumen created "people culture managers" in the absence of HRBPs.
- What do you see as the biggest TR challenges? Lumen's specific challenge is compression. On a broader level, pay equity is the biggest challenge. Lumen works with Syndio. They look at pay equity with a growth mindset and the thought that it will be revisited again and again. Last, using AI to raise the bar on better understanding their employees.
- Who is your most important peer partner when it comes to issues like compression? The CFO. The real trifecta is with the CHRO, CFO, and CEO.
- How do you think about non-monetary rewards? Lumen has a platform where people can give people kudos for free. They can give each other public or private recognition and give each other points. You can also give employees awards and points that can be redeemed for various gifts. The platform they use is fairly low cost.
- What do you think the strength of TR is? Data and analytics and connecting to business results.
- Can you tell us more about your phase retirement program? It allows people to retire on their own time. Employees can go part-time and receive full benefits for a year and then someone job shadows you to make sure there's not a loss of institutional knowledge. Really understanding what ppl care about is a real opportunity for TR.
- Are you reskilling talent? Lumen has created a lot around AI reskilling. Doing academies to help employees lean in in the right way. And then they supplement with external hires where they need to.
At our in-person meeting, we explored how a rapidly changing work environment and cost cutting is altering the way people look at performance management, examining organizational structures and their links to compensation.