In an exclusive from sister-title Workplace Savings and Benefits reporting from EB Live, Nationwide’s head of reward Mandy Cameron said the building society introduced the changes at the beginning of the current financial year but had not publicised the policy.
“We’ve removed sales incentives from all incentive plans, we now look at service. We don’t target that but it’s all managed through performance management and half quarterly calibrations prior to paying out any bonuses and it’s based on whole job performance,” Cameron said.
“We have reduced our bonus opportunities across some schemes that were particularly rich and we haven’t always deleveraged and put it onto pay. So we’ve tried to take employees with us, to say this will make us an even better organisation. Yes we’ve lost people along the way but not necessarily people we were worried about losing, our top performers have stayed with us.”
Cameron added that Nationwide had made a “conscious decision” to stay within the 100% bonus cap, rather than allowing shareholders to decide whether it could be raised to 200%.
Governance has also been increased across the whole organisation, going across all senior levels and feeding up to Nationwide’s executive committee and its remuneration committee.
Looking ahead, Cameron said she expected to see fixed pay increase in general for many businesses, as incentives were becoming a less attractive way of rewarding more senior staff.
“A lot of businesses, but not ourselves, are using fixed pay allowances and that’s because of the new cap that’s come in. So while we’ve reduced bonus opportunities we are not paying allowances to make up for those, a lot of businesses are because of the previous level of their bonus schemes,” she continued.
At Nationwide, Cameron said it was not always about spending money to reward employees: “One of the things with Nationwide, people say it’s a unique culture; we’re a market leading payer we don’t pay at the top of the industry for total pay.
“So we look at other things like our recognition schemes, there is a sense of belonging, our engagement is the highest it’s ever been, people feel enabled to do a great job and we work really hard in terms of fitting the brand and the employees together and listening to the employees in what we do,” she concluded.
