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B&Q has spent the last year reviewing its employees' reward and benefits package to simplify its offering.
Simplification has been at the heart of B&Q's HR strategy over the past year as part of the organisation's efforts to help staff understand and appreciate the value of their benefits and, ultimately, to boost take-up.
The move is aligned with B&Q's business objective to simplify its pricing model in response to the retail price wars that have been preoccupying many of its competitors. This has involved introducing set product prices instead of temporary discounts.
Janet Mckenzie, reward manager at B&Q, says: "We are trying to make HR easier for the business and to make benefits information easier for staff to find and understand."
Mckenzie has focused on a number of major projects since joining B&Q in June 2013 from The Body Shop, where she was international reward, policy and mobility manager.
Annual bonus plan redesign
She has redesigned B&Q's annual bonus plans, simplifying their messaging and design to make them easier for staff to understand. "If we have a bonus scheme that staff do not understand, then it is probably not as useful as it could be," she says.
Until the end of 2013, B&Q ran three bonus schemes: a company profit share plan, a management bonus plan and a store team bonus plan, each with its own criteria and payout levels.
For example, for the company profit share plan to pay out, a company-level profit target had to be hit and staff had to meet certain performance criteria, whereas the management bonus plan was based on company-level sales and profit.
Mckenzie says: "We questioned why we were not having the same targets in place across the board, so we worked to bring those plans together."
The company profit share plan and management bonus plans have been integrated into one scheme called 'The annual B&Q bonus', which is based on more streamlined criteria.
"When we are talking to an employee about their bonus opportunity, it is now a lot easier to explain what the opportunity is and what the plan measures are," says McKenzie.
But she acknowledges the challenges of assessing the impact of plan changes, which she is yet...