Reward that pays for the performance you actually need

Who this is for

• Owners and finance directors of growing businesses where pay has been set one hire at a time and no longer hangs together.
• HR directors and reward leads in larger organisations inheriting grading structures, allowances and bonus schemes from earlier eras or acquisitions.
• Commercial and sales leaders whose incentive plans pay out but do not drive the right results.

When reward stops working

In a smaller organisation

• Salaries were agreed at the point of hire, and nobody can explain the differences between similar roles.
• The annual bonus feels arbitrary and is resented more than it is valued.
• Good people leave for offers you could have matched if you had known where you stood.

In a larger organisation

• Several grading structures running side by side after growth or acquisition.
• Incentive plans that pay out in years when the business has underperformed.
• Sales incentives that reward volume at the expense of margin or mix.
• A performance rating process that consumes months and changes very little.

What we can help with

• Reward strategy: where you want to position pay against the market, and why.
• Job evaluation and grading: a defensible way to compare roles and place them in grades.
• Pay ranges and salary structures, with clear rules for progression.
• Allowances and benefits, so the total package is coherent and affordable.
• Short-term and sales incentives: measures, thresholds and payout curves.
• Performance management that connects goals and reviews to pay without turning the process into a negotiation.
• Market data through our reward benchmarking groups and, for schools, the UAE Education Reward Benchmark.

How we think about reward

Reward is one lever in a larger system. A generous bonus will not lift performance if roles are unclear, decision rights sit elsewhere, or the culture punishes the risks the bonus is meant to encourage. So we test any reward design against the rest of the organisation before recommending it.

We pay attention to discretionary effort: the extra people choose to give when they believe the system is fair. Pay rarely creates that effort on its own, but a pay system seen as unfair destroys it quickly.

Good market data cuts both ways. It can show where you are behind, but equally where you are already competitive or paying above market, which matters just as much when budgets are tight. We help you find a sustainable performance envelope for pay and set rules for recalibrating as the market moves.

In our Organisation Maturity Model, compensation and benefits is one of six domains; performance management sits in another, maximise potential. An organisation maturity audit shows which of these needs attention first.

Experience

10k runs a reward programme in the FMCG sector and a custom reward benchmarking group for hospitality, and is launching the UAE Education Reward Benchmark for upper-tier schools. Our benchmarking groups and reward programme are underpinned by our own technology and governance, and benchmark data is firewalled from our consulting work.