Want to get your reward & recognition strategy over the line? You’ll need to convince your CFO. Debra Corey of Rewards Gateway provides her tips for doing just that
Want to get your reward & recognition strategy over the line? You’ll need to convince your CFO. Debra Corey of Rewards Gateway provides her tips for doing just that
How significant is the CFO in terms of establishing an effective rewards and recognition strategy?
Do this right, and the CFO will act as a member of your winning relay team, working together to successfully pass the baton and finish the race as fast as you can. Do this wrong, and the CFO will instead be a hurdle you have to go over as you try to fi nish your race to establish and gain approval on your reward and recognition strategy.
Innovative CFOs recognise that the trophy for engagement initiatives, such as reward and recognition, is significant. Hewitt research showed that companies with double-digit growth had 20% higher engagement scores than those with single-digit growth.
- What are your tips for getting the CFO onside with the right kind of employee perks?
Highlight the ROI. When it comes to a CFO data is king (or queen), so it’s critical to give them what they want and need to get on your side. To do this you should highlight the ROI of your employee perks, by presenting a combination of soft metrics (eg employee engagement, retention) and hard metrics (eg salary savings for the company, discount savings for employees).
Speak the right language. Each function has its own language, so it’s critical to translate your HR speak into CFO speak, using tangible terms that they can relate to and accept.
One way you can do this is to relate the employee benefits strategy into the overall business strategy,
showing how it fits into the bigger overall picture.
Another way is to relate it back to the business itself. When I worked for a retailer, I would always present my proposals to the CFO in terms of jeans, saying how many more pairs of jeans each sales associate would have to sell to afford the program and how many more pairs of jeans the company would sell by implementing the program. This made it easy for the CFO to relate to and also showed that I respected their language.
Debra Corey
Group reward director
REWARDS GATEWAY