Regional Compensation & Benefits Leaders Gather in Singapore at BP

The Chapman Consulting Group, along with co-hosts BP, kicked off their C&B Leaders Networking session in Singapore this morning. Joined by Regional Reward Leaders from global organisations such as Amex, Cargill, Mars, Visa, Syngenta, NBC Universal, DHL Express, Tiger Airways, Otis Elevators, Flowserve, IFF, Mercer, Life Technologies, AbbVie, GTA, Schneider Electric and Glaxo SmithKline, discussions concentrated on the compensation and benefits challenges faced today across a wide range of industries.

Wendy Brotter, Head of Rewards/HR-Corp & Functions, APAC/SG at BP spoke about the high attrition rates at junior levels in countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and China. This led to a healthy discussion about how rewards involvement could be used to overcome this.

Aveenash Tewari, Director of Compensation & Benefits at American Express, presented a video which outlined the health and wellness strategy that has been rolled out across the company globally. He pointed out that there was a realisation that their medical scheme was not only non-communicative to its employees, but also non-preventive. To overcome this they introduced a global programme which took communication about the medical benefits of healthy living away from the intranet and brought it to all employees via interactive communication. He also stressed that any global programme such as this needed strong leadership support to see it through, something they were fortunate to have at Amex. Awareness + Access = Action was the mantra practised at Amex which includes access to gyms, the introduction of fitness coaches at the office and the provision of subsidies to employees and their families to incorporate healthy lifestyle choices such as yoga, dance etc into their lives. This was followed by an engaging video along the lines of Gangnam Style titled ‘Healthy Amex Style’ — starring all levels of Amex employees!

Aveenash left us with the idea that ‘Wellness of employees should be seen as an investment’. Following this, Penny Wu, Reward Consultant/Asia Pacific for BP, spoke about embedding total rewards for engagement. She stated that working for BP is not only about the dollars and cents, but about being a part of the entire ‘experience of a global company’ and that C&B is only as complicated as you make it.

Next was the discussion that while ‘Attrition is a given’ in all organisations, it’s the nature and content of C&B that adds value to the long term staying factor for any employee. Hence it is important that employees are aware of the total compensation and benefits offered to them by their company and not simply their base salary in isolation. With the relative ease with which we can acquire information on salaries these days, thanks to the likes of internet sites like payscale.com and glassdoor.com, it was agreed that the cultural readiness and maturity of the employees of a company can determine how much of the C&B can be openly shared and explained.