UFlexReward | Gratifying Employees to the Fullest | Steve Brink

It is vital to keep in mind visionary total reward professionals built the tool for a progressive company like Unilever that highly values its employees. The design and creative force behind the company’s products and services were  Peter Newhouse, Leena Nair, and Constantina Tribou from Unilever. uFlexReward’s role now is to continue this journey with the end users and reward professionals and employees. They do this first and foremost by viewing the rewards space through the lens of both the rewards pros and employees at both clients and prospects. From there, they have refined an extremely agile development environment to quickly deliver, implement, change, and improve upon new concepts. The “secret sauce” has closely tied client and prospect input to their development cycle.

Today companies use their data from disparate systems to view, evaluate, and make decisions around essential items such as detailed pay data for complex statutory disclosures, gender pay gap, and executive pay ratios. While uFlexReward brings all the data into the platform, making critical decisions is significantly more accessible as the user can first model the net effect of proposed changes. From the very beginning of the tool’s inception, it was imperative that we would be able to model potential changes accurately, giving companies the ability to look ahead clearly vs. adapting by looking in the rear-view mirror. 

uFlexReward feels that by creating a highly configurable system that integrates with the data and rules from the entire tech stack, they can make a platform to deliver consistent reporting and personalized employee engagement quickly and cost-effectively. “As for “thwarting the competition” we believe that if we build the right tools, the right way, and at the right time our solution will be valued by those companies looking to become leaders in attracting and retaining talent,” says Leigh Bornstein, uFlexReward’s Chief Experience Officer. “By focusing our efforts in this way, we don’t worry about thwarting the competition but working with all those solutions in the marketplace, allowing companies to leverage the best of all the point solutions available.”

Within the highly configurable platform, users can employ built-in modeling and what-if functions or use other applications to address challenging questions and problems throughout their organization quickly. Aggregating all the data from disparate systems allows the unique ability to view, evaluate, and make decisions around keys items such as detailed pay data for complex statutory disclosures, gender pay gap, and executive pay ratios; and manage Pay Equity; across all your countries, functions, and teams. Since the tool contains all of the elements of total rewards, uFlexReward provides intuitive real-time complete reward statements with the ability to select reward options to personalize total rewards for each individual.

With the uFlexReward platform layered across the HR tech stack, companies can update, replace, or add any offerings while maintaining consistent on-demand reporting and a uniform flexible employee engagement platform. Companies can test or evaluate reward options over time to reduce cost, reallocate spending, or improve highly valued elements. This includes the ability to potentially continue using legacy systems that may either be extremely expensive or take significant time to update or replace and allow companies to focus on the immediate needs of the business or employees. With the center of gravity potentially shifting to the platform layer, the ability to be creative and implement new reward elements has exponentially grown.

For uFlexReward prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion is very important in today’s world. “This is actually one of the reasons I personally started my journey at uFlexReward. We have the opportunity to help organizations become fair payers and even incorporate livable wage information into their evaluation,” says Sean Luitjens, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at uFlexReward. “We believe equity will expand beyond base salary and will be measured across the entire total rewards offering. uFlexReward is already positioned to allow organizations to not only measure these items but model changes.”

For instance, by being an early adopter and implementing the tool, Unilever became a market leader in total rewards. The tool allows them to evaluate their total spending in 110 countries, utilize employee feedback and reallocate based upon this information, adding new options for employees, and model the impacts of potential changes globally. With all the data digitized, Unilever managed the direction of their human capital investment more effectively and documented a return on their initial spend investment in 9 months.

“I think the Future of Work and Personalized rewards are just beginning to become a reality for companies to deliver. Years ago, concepts that rewards professionals created to solve issues and engage employees couldn’t reasonably be delivered,” adds Steve Brink, President of uFlexReward. “Those days are past and with technology today companies have the opportunity to define how they see the future and then deliver those visions.”