Involving your stakeholders in your reward strategy development process helps to build buy-in and support for the reward strategy across the organisation. You can ensure that your strategy is comprehensive, aligned with your objectives and values, and meets the needs of both your organisation and your employees.

But who are the stakeholders you should be involving and why?

(It's in alphabetical order because the importance is down to your organisation culture)

Current Employees, Managers and supervisors: These people are on the receiving end of the reward strategy, and employees or their representatives can provide valuable input to ensure the strategy meets their needs and preferences.  If your strategy is all about employee retention, engagement, development and culture these are the people you need to talk to.  Find out what they want. (It’s no mistake that these come first, even if this is an alphabetical list! I could have called them staff)

Executives and other Senior Leaders: These are the stakeholders who will have a strategic perspective on your objectives.  They will have approved the strategic objectives and can provide insider guidance on how the reward strategy can support those objectives.

Finance team: Your finance team will provide insights into the financial impact of different compensation and benefits programs and help to ensure that the reward strategy is financially sustainable.  This is the team that will ensure you strategy is financially sound and gets the nod.

HR and compensation team: this team have expertise in designing and administering compensation and benefits programs, and can provide insights into best practices and industry benchmarks. They also will be able to give you insight into the engagement impact of your proposals. They are likely to have their ear to the ground in respect of what your competitors are up to as well.  They will also be helping you with communications (unless you have a specific employee communications/engagement team).

IT Team:  Because you will no doubt have to integrate something with your current IT, even if its link to the relevant provider on your intranet.  Get this team involved early, because the last thing you need is your strategy being stalled at the implementation stage.

Legal and compliance experts: Legal and compliance experts can ensure that the reward strategy complies with relevant laws and regulations, such as GDPR, equal pay laws and tax regulations. 

Potential Employees:  Radical maybe, but you could ask your interview candidates what else they would like to see in the comp and ben package.  After all, these are the people making the decision to join you, or not, based on your reward strategy.

In our experience, if you don’t involve groups of stakeholders such as employees then your assumptions about what your strategy should look like could end up stagnant; based on the same concepts and ideas you've always had, and your strategy will not be engaging and so will not deliver the outcomes you hope.