What we do

We pride ourselves in promoting the effectiveness of Human Resources as a strategic business partner through training and consultancy support on:


â—Ž Adoption (design and implementation) of competitive Employee Reward policies and practices

â—Ž Embedding effective Performance Management with links to other Human Resources functions

â—Ž Management of vibrant structures that compliment the organisation strategy

â—Ž Building policy frameworks that promote compliance, stronger governance and risk mitigation

Employee Reward

  • Base Salary

    Base Salary is a guaranteed amount paid to an employee regularly at an agreed frequency and is the minimum amount that an employee receives in exchange for their services. It does not include any benefits, bonuses or non-regular payments. The Base Salary is stated in the contract of employment and remains the same unless there has been an agreed change.

  • Allowances

    Some organisations pay their employees allowances whose purpose and eligibility vary. Examples for some allowances are:


              â—Ž Standard: Awarded to employees across all levels. 

              â—Ž Role Specific: For employees in roles that have different demands from standard roles.

              â—Ž Seniority Linked: Reserved only for Senior employees. 

              â—Ž At-Risk: Offered when work environment exposes an employee to some unusual risk(s).

              â—Ž Inconvenience: When work demands disrupts employees' personal life outside working hours. 

  • Variable Pay

    Variable Pay is a non-guaranteed payment that  is normally dependent on both individual and organisation performance. Individual performance determines payment to each employee and Organisation performance determines the overall amount available for distribution. 


    Bonus: Annual bonuses are the most common variable pay type. They are awarded as immediate cash and for more senior positions, the awards can include deferred cash or share awards. 


    Sales Incentives: Sales incentives are  based on an agreed formula between performance and the payout. This is used to reward sales staff and is administered through an established sales incentive policy. 

  • Executive Reward Management

    Reward at this level is more sophisticated requiring an individual approach to its benchmarking and management.  The compensation is compared to specific similar positions that the organisation competes directly with. Executive reward must be structured in order to support longterm alignment with Shareholder interests. 

  • Employee Recognition

    Apart from offering direct monetary benefit, organisations need to put in place recognition programmes that show immediate appreciation of the  employee’s contributions. This needs to be creative and designed to reinforce positive work performance. Meaningful recognition must be Personal, Specific, and Immediate. 

We partner with our clients in creating internally consistent and externally competitive reward structures whilst ensuring that decisions taken are transparent and defensible. 

Employee Performance Management

Performance Management is about planning, monitoring, evaluation and rewarding employees in return of their achievements against an agreed set of objectives. This process cascades the achievement of organisational goals through SMART objectives that are set for each employee at the beginning of the performance cycle. For improved success, the line manager and the employee must conduct regular check-ins to monitor progress and provide support to enable performance expectations to be met.

 

The effectiveness of Performance Management is constantly being debated as the process can be perceived as subjective especially in cases where managers are not well-trained or if the process is not transparent. However, the benefits of implementing Performance Management outweigh the drawbacks. A well managed performance management cycle clarifies levels of performance being achieved through continuous engagements between line manager and employee. 


Performance Management has strong links to other Human Resources areas as described below.

The  process must be agile and constantly respond to the changing environment which impacts the relevance of what is being measured and how it is being measured.

Inspired Dimensions has the expertise of designing effective Performance Management systems that are customeised to each organisation and have agility to respond to the changing environment. 

Job Evaluation

A job evaluation is an analytical approach of determining the worth of a job when compared to others within the same organization. Prior to any successful evaluation process, two steps must be completed:


Job Analysis

A systematic approach of obtaining important and relevant information about each distinct role as fulfilled by one or more incumbents. The incumbents and line manager provide the core input into the role and a trained Evaluator then provides an objective view of the job content. Critical data that must be established for each role include nature of the work, the skills required and the working conditions.


Job Description

This follows the completion of Job Analysis and covers the scripting of the gathered information into a Job Description. This documentation identifies, defines and describes the key features of a job as it is performed. Apart from the core description, this also includes the minimum experience and qualifications required to perform the job.

  • Job Grading / Banding

    This is the placing of jobs into different grades following a hierarchical structure within the organisation. An output of this process is a grouping of jobs that are judged to have the same worth to the organisation being placed in the same hierarchical level known as the Job Grade. Factors considered for this vary depending on the preferred Job Evaluation method. The established hierarchy can be through traditional grades or broad banding structures.


    Broad banding is similar to grading with the key difference that it consolidates several traditional job grades into one broad band resulting in a decrease in the number of levels within an organisation. 


    Broad banding works efficiently in organisations which prefer flatter structures that reduce the distance between decision makers and those doing the implementation. Under broad bands, there are less promotion opportunities and more latitude for pay increases and career growth within the same band. The flexibility provided by broad banding can lead to internal pay relativity challenges as there is less control over salary progression when compared with a traditional multi-level job grading structure.

  • Job Families

    This is a classification of group of jobs that are closely related requiring similar skills, knowledge and training. The work undertaken and the expertise required is similar. Career levels reflecting the traditional grades or banding are then built within the Job Families and the salary structures are applied to these levels.


    For easier management, some job families can share the same salary structures in instances where the organisation does not intend to differentiate on these families or where the market data shows similar salary levels for these families. 


Our approach to Job Evaluations provides a customised framework for transparent management of employee development and reward within the organisation.

HR Reward Policy Design

Effective governance of Employee Reward is dependent on having strong policies in place that provide the framework on how reward decisions are made. It provides a consistent framework for decision making and takes into account several factors inclusive of business strategy, stage of development the organisation, industry, market benchmarking and the talent the organisation aims to attract, recruit and retain.

 

The policies also work to ensure that the organisation approach to reward complies with local regulations. At Executive level, these policies ensure that the interests of the senior management is aligned with long-term interests of the Shareholders.

 

Some of the reward policies that Inspired Dimensions has had experience in setting up include:

â—Ž Organisation-wide generic Reward Policy

â—Ž Executive Long Term Incentive Plan

â—Ž Employee Benefits Policy

â—Ž Severance Policy

â—Ž Retention Plans

The policy objectives must be clear and governance strong for consistent application and leaves little room for discretion.