Measuring impact
Reward, includes all the things that attract, retain and motivate people to work in the NHS. This includes financial and non-financial awards which create a total reward package.
The NHS People Promise's theme ‘we are recognised and rewarded, sets out some of the things that employers should be offering as part of their total reward package. However, we know that many NHS organisations offer a range of rewards and benefits above and beyond this.
It’s important to ensure that your reward package is right for your workforce and is having a positive impact.
You can demonstrate that your offer is creating the desired impact, making a difference to your workforce and ensuring value for money through evaluation.
A successful evaluation will help you to:
- understand how effective your reward package is
- measure your retention levels to ensure maximum impact
- test and develop your reward package
- improve communications around your reward package
- demonstrate the value of your work and replicate good practice.
Evaluating your reward offering provides the opportunity to review existing benefits, explore staff opinions on what benefits they value and which new benefits they would like to see introduced. This will demonstrate your investment in staff, positively affect employee engagement and help to meet your organisational priorities, such as attraction and retention.
There are lots of ways to collect the feedback that you will need to evaluate your reward offering. Here are a few examples and ideas of activities you could use:
- Test the desirability of your reward package with a small group of the organisation and feed them into your evaluation plan.
- focus groups or listening exercises
- benefits roadshows
- benefit champions
- internal surveys.
- Look at your staff survey results, particularly the theme, we are recognised and rewarded.
- Pilot potential benefits with staff to see how they respond to them.
- Look at data from your benefit platform (if you have one) to assess the levels of take up and any profit or savings generated.
- Analyse your existing benefits to understand which are being accessed.
- Engage with managers and local trade union representatives to seek feedback.
To evaluate your reward package robustly, it’s important to build it into your overall strategic approach from the beginning.
Develop a reward strategy
We have a range of resources available to support you to plan, develop and implement a reward strategy:
Planning evaluation
When you start to plan your evaluation, think about the following steps:
Include what you set out to achieve.
The objectives you aim to achieve should be set out clearly in your plan. For example, you may want to increase awareness of your reward offer among staff with a communications campaign.
Create an evaluation plan
Identify your target audience, tasks and activities and define the performance measures. Expand the selection for help on how to do this.
Collect evidence as defined in your plan so that you can measure the impact
Collect quantitative and qualitative data and link into the data your organsiation already collects or what you can easily access. Expand the selection for help on how to do this.
Analyse the data and evidence collected
Once you have gathered your data and evidence you will need to explore to what extent you have met your objectives.
Share your findings with others
Plan who you need to share your findings with, for example with your senior team, trade union representatives, communications team and staff. This will demonstrate how their input and feedback has helped to influence change and make improvements. You can use information from your evaluation to support any communication messages.
Use the template evaluation plan below to evaluate your reward package and consider your next steps based on the evidence you have collected. It is essential that you continually evaluate your package. When you are starting to plan your evaluation, you should think about the following steps: The objectives you aim to achieve should be set out clearly in your plan. For example, you may want to increase awareness of your reward package among staff with a communications campaign.
Use our evaluation plan template (Word.doc).
