In our search for a dissenting voice — someone who dares to rethink compensation policies — we spoke with Joris De Wortelaer, who together with Nathalie Arteel developed a unique training program on “Rewarding Differently.” Joris has twenty years of experience as a Compensation & Benefits Manager at ING Belgium. He is also a labor law attorney with his own practice and a professor of legal aspects of HR management at VUB in Brussels.
Better Individual than Collective
Joris criticizes the focus on collective compensation:
“Everything has to be collective, but that ignores the fact that people also need to be approached, recognized, and rewarded individually. Collective optimizations generate nothing extra because your competitors do the same. An individually focused rewards model, on the other hand, leads to higher motivation, profitability, and retention.”
Instead of putting everything into rigid policies, he argues that it’s better to give managers freedom:
“They know their employees best. You cannot recognize an employee if you don’t know what they value. Recognition is not about bonuses — it’s about how you make people feel. By focusing on collective rewards, you may even inadvertently increase total payroll costs by rewarding the wrong things — things that don’t matter or are not requested. In other words, we need to return to the individual and give managers both autonomy and budget to reward individual performance more efficiently and effectively.”
Negative Retention
“Be careful with salary optimization,” Joris continues. “Group insurance, service anniversary bonuses, and all other ‘artificial’ optimized compensation have no real value. They don’t create a fundamental connection that makes employees feel truly engaged. You don’t gain a competitive advantage that way. You achieve that by rethinking your payroll, rewarding differently, and differentiating.”
Collective salary optimization often misses the mark. We should evolve toward a remuneration system that can reward individual performance much faster — within 24, 48, or 72 hours.
Additionally, we need to consider medium-term recognition mechanisms (two to three years). Research from Acerta shows that 75% of employees leave within three to five years after hiring, across all sectors. If turnover occurs between three and five years, you need to adjust your retention policy. In that sense, many reward systems tied to 25, 30 years or more are highly inefficient.
This can even create negative retention: pumping a large portion of payroll into a retention policy that doesn’t resonate with younger employees, inadvertently contributing to the “golden cage effect.”
Lost Payroll Potential
The most common objection from HR directors is that there’s no budget left for individual rewards. According to Joris, this can be solved by bringing in the right expertise:
“It’s about freeing up budget and discovering where margin exists. Many hidden payroll costs exist within an organization: warrants, for example (people underestimate the 6% hidden banking fees), and supplementary pensions (management fees). Beyond that, there is also lost payroll potential: elements that are unknown or often unused, such as meal vouchers. There is usually financial room, but you need the know-how to uncover it. For that, it’s best to engage an expert.”
Rethinking Total Payroll
According to Joris, much of a company’s payroll goes to the wrong targets:
“We need to manage total personnel costs differently. Suppose the average cost per employee is €100,000. 80% is determined by job classification, and 20% goes to collective benefits. Then indeed, there seems to be no budget left to do something extra. But you could choose to allocate €4,000 of that €100,000 for individual recognition. You don’t have to limit it to the employee — you can include their family or children. This way, you make a much bigger impact. Benefits in kind can account for up to 20%; that’s the only limit.”
“To reward more in an experience-driven way, you don’t need an expert in job classifications, but an expert in payroll management who frees up budget and creates room to reward differently.”
Examples of Experience-Driven Rewards
“Give an employee who loves the Olympics a ticket as a recognition gesture. Allow someone passionate about Italy to work for a few weeks from a hotel there. Give an animal-loving colleague a budget to sponsor an animal shelter. Or hire a personal coach for an employee training for a sports event.”
This, too, is payroll optimization: with the same budget, you increase both employee engagement and recognition.
