Are you wasting your time on TRS?

13th October 2011


Preparing total reward statements costs time and money, but is it time well spent on a valued employee document or a wasted resource that will often go unread? Glyn King shares his thoughts on how to maximum value from your total reward statement project, including the advantages of presenting total reward with payroll communications.

Glyn comments: "Communicating the variety and value of an employee’s reward and benefits package takes planning and resources. Developments in technology have made the process less labour intensive, and in turn driven down costs, but isn't all this good work just lost if employees fail to read their reward statements?

You may take the view that you can 'lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink', that's partly true, but what I suggest, is if we make that 'water' more appealing your horse is more likely to take a sip.

I’ll give you an example: at Prolog Print Media we’ve been producing total reward statements for over four years. We started with printed total reward statements, taking data from various HR, Reward, Payroll and Pension systems. We added value to this process by dynamically printing different data sets on individual total reward statements: so each employee could see exactly the rewards for which they had entitlement. We continue to do this today, but working smarter to engage employees.

This year we’ve started implementing multi-channel total reward statements. What does this mean? We now take the same data files as our print only service, but use them to print or present online total reward statements.

By giving employees the choice of how they view their total reward statement – in print, online or both – we are making total reward information available to each employee when, where and how they want to receive it: improving readership and engagement.

We are also delivering – for epayslip customers of Prolog Print Media – total reward statements on the same secure platform as our epayslip service. We all know employees view their payslips – probably more than any other workplace communication – so it makes sense to have total reward statements available to view in the same place. Whether weekly or monthly paid employees, reward professionals working with us know their people will be online typically 12-56 times a year minimum looking at pay, so they can use this resource to add alerts and messages about rewards or for employees to access a pdf copy of their last total reward statement.

In summary I believe total reward statements are a valuable communications tool, but they must be distributed in a way that meets each employees needs, to have relevance and value."

For more information on eTRS or epayslips call 01246 543000 or email us

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We consolidate data and print personalised total reward statements

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