IT company Wortell adjusted its remuneration policy to self-organised teams. We can now offer more flexibility’.

IT service provider Wortell underwent a major transformation last year. In order to become more flexible, the company changed its organisational structure and created self-organising teams. The top-down era was over: no more managers, but self-determination. In the new structure, the employee is central, as is the emphasis on personal responsibility. 

This new vision on working had to be reflected in the entire HR policy. So also in remuneration. The company asks employees to take responsibility themselves. No more managers determining the goals; teams and employees are now at the helm themselves. The result: greater intrinsic motivation. This means that, as an employer, you also have to provide the space for this,” says Marlon Ranson-van den Berg, who is responsible for HR policy at Wortell. Not only in the work itself, but also in the terms of employment’.

New vision on Reward

In order to facilitate this personal responsibility in remuneration, Wortell wanted to offer more freedom of choice in employment conditions. Ranson-van den Berg: “If you want more holidays, a more expensive laptop or the latest iPhone, then that should be possible. This required an adjustment of the current remuneration policy.

Before the transformation, Wortell already offered employees a certain degree of flexibility in their working conditions. Employees could buy and sell holidays and build up a voluntary pension. But this was not enough for the new way of looking at remuneration. For example, employees could only buy holidays in January. But many people do not know at that time what their plans are for the rest of the year.

‘The previous system was outdated’

To calculate all individual choices of employees, HR worked with its own system in Excel. It worked fine for making these calculations. But administratively it was clumsy and it was not suitable for realising greater freedom of choice. Moreover, the system was rather old-fashioned, says Ranson-van den Berg. We are an innovative club and we offer customers innovative solutions, but internally we were still working with Excel sheets. We want to offer our employees the same quality that we offer our customers. That is a piece of good employment practice.

To support the new reward policy, Wortell chose Inspire, an application of Pointlogic HR that gives employees insight in their total reward. Employees can simulate future scenarios, which gives them insight into the consequences of individual choices on their salary – the basis for taking more responsibility.

Communication is crucial

The system is only a link in the chain of adopting freedom of choice for employees. But in order to realise that freedom, employees must be familiar with the system. An important part of the success or failure of the new remuneration policy is therefore in the communication of the system, Ranson-van den Berg knows from experience.

We implement new IT systems at clients on a daily basis, so we know how important it is to create support among users. Otherwise it will not work, no matter how good your intentions are. We have invested heavily in Inspire’s communication. From an HR perspective, it is important to know what is going on with employees, which is why we held many sessions in which employees could contribute and ventilate their ideas. Employees have also chosen the new name themselves. Ultimately, it has to become a system for all of us.

‘We have a pretty critical audience’

The new remuneration policy and system have only been in place for a few months, but the freedom of choice seems to be catching on. We have quite a critical audience, but the reactions are good. Of course there are still some points for improvement, but everyone joined in quickly and we get a lot of positive feedback. We really see that the extra choice options are being used more often. Especially the possibilities of saving up salary and taking holiday pay flexibly, in order to buy or sell holidays later in the year.

For HR, Inspire should result in less administrative work in due course. But the biggest gain is mainly in more flexibility for employees. Remuneration is now more in line with the strategy. Ranson-van den Berg: ‘We demand flexibility from employees, but we can now also offer more flexibility.

Wortell

In job advertisements we say that, as an employer, we offer a lot of flexibility. With Inspire, we can really demonstrate this in the employment conditions interview: which employment conditions do we offer you and which choices are most advantageous to you?

App in the candidate journey

The app also has benefits for the outside world. Ranson-van den Berg notices that it is a good tool in the candidate journey. Not a luxury, given that Wortell operates in the scarce IT market. In vacancies we say that as an employer we offer a lot of flexibility. With Inspire we can really demonstrate this in the employment conditions interview: which employment conditions are we offering you and which choices are most advantageous to you?

This is not only informative, but according to Ranson-van den Berg also demonstrates a unique selling point. Candidates experience immediately how much they can determine themselves when they come to work for us. Moreover, they see an advanced and solid system. Such an image fits into the bigger picture of being a good employer. Rewarding is not only paying out salaries, but also offering flexibility and attention. In the work itself, but also in matters such as remuneration. If you offer that, as we have seen, you get happy and satisfied employees in return.

This article was published before here.