Beyond the Paycheck: Investing in Caregiving to Drive Employee Retention and Productivity

Enhancing Productivity and Creating Relationship Breakthroughs Through Your Total Rewards

It’s no secret that employees are key to an organization’s productivity and profitability. Research shows a clear link between engaged, authentic, healthy employees and positive business results. But what can employers do to enhance the employee experience and become a high-performance organization?Ingrid Woolfolk, employee experience lead with WTW, shared insights and next steps in a thought leadership spotlight session about “Creat[ing] Relationship Breakthroughs Through Your Total Rewards” at From Day One’s Chicago benefits conference.WTW helps clients build resilience, inspire their workforces, and optimize performance with data-driven solutions in people, risk, and capital. With over 50 years of insights across industries, they’ve analyzed how employee experience, rewards programs, and company performance are connected.What Makes a Winning Company?To understand what high-performance organizations are doing differently, WTW analyzed results from 16 million surveys completed between 2002 and 2023, including 6 million individual employees from 600 companies in what they call the “post-disruption era” (2019–2023). They compared the employee experience and tracked 9 separate financial metrics across 30 global high-performing companies and 500 average companies.Ingrid L. Woolfolk, the employee experience leader at WTW, led the session Data showed that total rewards are important to employees, even if they don’t use that language. Because of this, it is crucial for companies to understand what employees need and innovate their offerings to fulfill those needs. The three areas that emerged as most important to employees were recognition, growth, and well-being. These three areas also happen to be existing differentiators for global high-performance (GHP) organizations.“Recognition goes beyond traditional monetary rewards,” said Woolfolk. Leading companies prioritize pay equity, transparency, and customized compensation options. They foster loyalty and internal growth by setting clear goals, offering development opportunities, and providing advancement pathways. Comprehensive well-being programs—addressing physical, emotional, social, and financial needs—demonstrate that employees are valued beyond their productivity while removing barriers to engagement.Five Predictions for 2025Based on this research, and requests from existing clients, WTW predicts that companies will pursue the following five focus areas in 2025 to drive performance and elevate their employees’ total rewards experience.Artificial intelligence: Companies are already showing interest in using AI to improve business outcomes and improve the employee experience through enhanced communication, navigation, analytics, and operational efficiency.Spending money where it counts by analyzing employee wants and needs alongside cost and utilization rates to better understand the overall ROI of specific benefits. Subsequent communication campaigns will ensure clear articulation of the total rewards value.Bolstering employee pocketbooks: Woolfolk and team anticipate that companies will seek to improve the affordability of pay and benefits programs, advance employees’ financial acumen and resilience, and enhance retirement offerings. Elevating transparency beyond compliance: Data shows that DEI programs may evolve into broader, more sustainable human capital strategies that promote equity, inclusivity, and pay transparency. These strategies are expected to exceed current compliance standards through new governance models and stakeholder reporting.Double-down on careers by developing career frameworks that align with business goals and support productivity targets while growing and rewarding critical employee skills.Where Can You Start?Woolfolk suggests collaborating with HR and finance partners to assess your current plans. Including the finance team up front can reduce decision-making delays and improve planning. Ensure you have a solid listening strategy so you can collect, analyze, and act upon employee feedback. “Make sure you don’t ask questions that you’re not willing to address,” she said, “because nothing hurts employee morale worse than asking questions and they never hear anything back.”Work with vendors to optimize the design of benefit plans, she says. Take the lead of high-performance organizations by being sensitive to the diverse, evolving needs of your employee populations, including more people in the planning as your organization’s story emerges, and being transparent about what’s next.“Taking action now is really important.” Woolfolk said. Identifying your strengths, weaknesses, and goals is crucial to engaging with the correct partners and building out the rest of your total rewards plan. Any listening strategy or employee survey is not a single event that leads you to high performance. It is a multi-faceted, ongoing exercise, and needs to be blended with a great communication strategy and change management principles.“Combining that change management with that communication strategy is paramount. In order to create the relationship breakthrough, you need that dialogue. You need listening,” said Woolfolk. You need communication that ultimately creates that high-performing employee experience that we all want, to help drive productivity.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, WTW, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.