Now hiring: CEO – Competitive salary and benefits

FUTURE OF WORK

Your company needs a new CEO, but your board of directors doesn’t know what kind of salary they should offer. It can be harder than you think to get it right, which is where Reward Agency comes in.

TEXT: DAVID J. CORD

“We help companies attract, motivate and commit employees with monetary and non-monetary rewards,” explains Samuli Sistonen, founder and managing director of Reward Agency. “We do this by helping our clients develop efficient performance management and rewards.”

Reward Agency is a specialist in linking remuneration to performance, such as creating short- and long-term incentive programmes and sales compensation schemes.

“It’s difficult to set targets, much less link remuneration to them,” Sistonen says. “We advise companies how to set strategy-driven goals and create processes, plans and practices to properly pay their staff.”

If we return to our hypothetical CEO search, Reward Agency could tell our board of directors how much CEOs are typically paid in our industry, in our region, for companies our size. Reward Agency could work with us to set short- and long-term goals and tie appropriate rewards to them. Now we should be able to attract the best candidate and then properly encourage them.

THIS CAN’T BE ACHIEVED IN A VACUUM, which is why Reward Agency maintains proprietary data on executive and board remuneration in Finland. They also use other domestic and international sources so they have useful, up-to-date information for a multinational talent market.

“Many companies want to bring structure into their workforce remuneration,” explains Ville Kämppi, partner at Reward Agency. “Companies may not have real insight into their compensation consistency and competitiveness. Simply collecting and presenting this data can be of great value, but then we can use the data to make valuable improvements.”

Kämppi is responsible for analytics at Reward Agency, handling such things as compensation analysis, cost simulations, M&A scenarios and drafting job frameworks. He and Sistonen have extensive international experience – in fact Kämppi lives in Canada – and bring global best practices to Finnish companies ranging from startups to multinationals.

“We stay on top of corporate remuneration, including the technical tools we use for data analytics,” Kämppi says.

Their international exposure also allows them to see trends before they reach Finland.

“Discussing salary is still taboo in Finland,” Sistonen continues. “In North America a help wanted advertisement might give a salary range, but you don’t see much of that here yet. But the younger generation is much more open about this and understand the benefits of transparency, so we see it more and more.” |

Samuli Sistonen, founder and managing director of Reward Agency.

If you are interested in learning more about holistic, agile, personalised, transparent and responsible performance management and rewards, please visit rewardagency.org.