Leveraging Total Rewards to Fuel a Motivated Workforce

Sanjeevani: Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the simple and AI-powered rewards and recognition platform for employee engagement.

Sanjeevani: I've been extensively thinking about Total Rewards lately, and I've come to a realization: it's not just another HR strategy, and it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all playbook. Total Rewards has the power to go beyond paychecks and benefits, it can redefine how organizations connect with their people and create more meaningful, holistic experiences that truly engage employees. But are we really sure we know what a holistic, impactful Total Rewards program actually looks like, and how good are we at designing systems that resonate with employees while aligning with business goals? That's what we're exploring today, and to help us with it, I'm excited to welcome Priyambi Chordia Malvai, an expert in Total Rewards and HR leadership. She currently heads Total Rewards, Organization Effectiveness, and HRBP for Emerging Businesses at Times Internet. I'm your host, Sanjeevani Saikia, and today we'll discuss how Total Rewards can fuel a motivated, high-performing workforce. Let's get started. Hi, Priyambi, thank you so much for joining us today, how are you doing?

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: Thank you for having me, Sanjeevani, great opportunity. I'm doing great, save for Delhi's pollution, but thankfully I'm working from home today, so doing well, thanks.

Sanjeevani: It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. After a brief chat before this podcast, two things stood out to me: first, your incredible passion for fostering a people-first culture, and second, your deep expertise in Total Rewards. That's why I'm especially excited to discuss this with you today. So without further ado, let's start. When we think about Total Rewards, it's not just the individual pieces like salary or perks that matter, it's how all these elements come together to create something more meaningful for employees. What truly defines an effective Total Rewards program, according to you? Is it the design, the delivery, or something else entirely?

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: You've brought in a few elements there already. For any Total Rewards program to be effective, the first thing to understand is exactly that, we're talking about Total Rewards, not just rewards. So the important thing when you're designing and implementing anything is understanding who you're designing for, what you're designing, why, and how it gets implemented. That's the framework I work with. Today's workforce is far more informed, globally connected, and aspirational compared to earlier generations, even my own. They also look for instant, quick gratification, but interestingly, they have extreme clarity about what they want out of life, you see trends like DINKs and SINKs (double or single income, no kids) becoming far more common. It's genuinely striking how accelerated the change in this workforce landscape is. So any effective rewards program has to be agile enough to cater to these shifts quickly.

For myself, as a guiding principle, I've created a nine-letter acronym that keeps me on track when designing or rolling out a Total Rewards program: IMPACTFUL. Let me walk through it. "I" is for Inclusivity, not just including and tailoring rewards for a diverse workforce, but building in flexibility and personalization so employees can choose what matters most to them, customizable to the extent an organization can actually administer it. Things like customized learning paths, flexi-benefits, or flexible work arrangements all fall under this. "M" is Market awareness, staying ahead of the curve on innovative programs available in the market, whether that's gamification, flexi-comp, or newer services like estate management, which has recently started reaching organizations, helping employees understand what happens to their assets, whether they've made a will, especially relevant post-COVID when many families were left without clarity. Sometimes it's just education, you don't need to spend money on the service itself.

"P" is Partnership. Total Rewards isn't just compensation and benefits, it includes career development, learning and growth, pride in the company brand, the people you work with, your manager, even how challenging the job itself is. Designing a program is easy, but implementing it well requires real collaboration across centers of excellence, business leaders, and managers, smooth handoffs and alignment turn fragmented efforts into one cohesive strategy. "A" is Alignment, aligning rewards with both employee preferences and organizational goals. Studies from leading consulting and HR research firms consistently reveal a gap between what employees actually value and where organizations focus their efforts, often compensation, when employees are actually prioritizing growth. Employee growth also drives organizational growth in a way compensation alone doesn't, which is exactly why alignment matters so much.

"C" is Communication, ensuring clarity and transparency about the full value of Total Rewards. Employees need to understand the full scope of what they're getting, and the responsibility for that lies with Total Rewards professionals broadly, not just comp and benefits people, but L&D, talent management, HR operations, everyone shaping employee experience. "T" is Technology, a major addition over the last 8 to 10 years, using advanced tools, data analysis, AI, and feedback mechanisms to adapt programs in real time and optimize resource allocation, and to administer things like flexi-benefits or flexible work arrangements, the way you and I are connecting over Zoom right now is a direct result of that shift. "F" is Financial optimization, Total Rewards professionals can never take their eyes off how budgets are optimized for maximum impact, being clear about what's a substantive program versus a flashy "candy floss" initiative that looks good but delivers less.

"U" is Unified scope, making sure Total Rewards genuinely encompasses learning programs, career growth, engagement, employer branding, and job challenge, not siloed pieces, they're all interlinked. And "L" is Long-term vision, aiming for aspirational goals while still delivering measurable results in the present. A lot of this might sound like a lot, but for me it's a working framework, a way to keep asking myself: am I being true to long-term vision, to financial optimization, and to what extent? If I can't do something on the technology front due to budget, at least I know I tried, and I understand what worked and what didn't.

Sanjeevani: You mentioned earlier a bit about today's workforce, and you've given us this amazing nine-element framework. Does it change at all when we specifically talk about Gen Z entering the workforce?

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: The beauty of this framework is that no real change is required. Take the first letter, Inclusivity, cohort-based flexibility is already built in. If I look at my data and ask what percentage of my population is genuinely Gen Z, or pair that with the Technology letter, using data and feedback loops, I can tailor programs to whichever cohort I'm focusing on. I've done this before with other age groups, not Gen Z specifically, but a notably younger-than-expected workforce at a traditional manufacturing company, which required tailoring programs I hadn't originally planned for. The same principle applies to Gen Z. Two or three things stand out to me specifically for them: the Inclusivity element is an absolute win, since a recent report, I believe from Forbes, found Gen Z highly values workplace inclusivity and how sustainable an organization genuinely is, not just profit-driven, but authentically working to reduce environmental impact and give back to society. Earlier generations had CSR too, but it was often a mandate, a fixed percentage of profits, not something people-driven. Today, many younger employees are already doing things to give back in their personal time, and if you can tie a CSR program to that genuine aspiration rather than making it a checkbox exercise, that's incredibly powerful.

Sanjeevani: Lately we've seen companies embracing trends like remote work, wellness initiatives, and flexible benefits, it's clearly widespread and companies are catching up sincerely. Have you observed this trend, and how do you think companies can adapt to these rapid changes?

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: I might surprise you with my answer here. With the recent surge in flexible work arrangements, work from home, hybrid versus remote versus in-office, after the initial three or four months of COVID shock, digital businesses got back into action first, and normalization happened as tools matured and we adapted very quickly as a species. But I think real "new normal" only settled in over the last year or so. Instead of virtual-only or hybrid being the default assumption, we've settled into something closer to flexible work arrangements, and organizations have increasingly felt the need to bring people back to the office, which is a real dynamic many businesses are navigating. My own organization is a news media company, an essential-services business in some ways, so part of our workforce never really had the option to go fully remote, while another part had full flexibility. When we re-looked at "normal," we realized that 100% virtual, purely optimizing for employee preference, swung the balance too far in one direction. There's a balance between what employees prefer, external forces like COVID, and what the organization actually requires, and I think that's led to a kind of cohort-based flexibility: one part of our business runs close to 90% virtual and works very well, another runs fully in-person. I wouldn't say I personally prefer hybrid, it genuinely depends on the nature of the business you're running. What has shifted is that leaders have become far more sensitive and empathetic to people's needs, while still balancing organizational requirements, understanding that employees bring their whole selves to work now, not just a "professional" version of themselves.

Sanjeevani: You just mentioned relational versus transactional rewards, I think our listeners would love to understand that concept in more depth.

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: An employee and an organization are fundamentally in a relationship, and an organization is nothing but a set of people. So the concept of relationship never really goes away. There's always a transactional relationship: I join, I sign a contract, here's my scope of work, here's what you'll pay me for it, a straightforward exchange of work for money. But we aren't robots, we're people. While a reward program absolutely needs a financial baseline, that's hygiene, the real magic happens beyond the paycheck-chasing mentality, because people can switch jobs quickly for a modest salary bump without ever feeling truly connected to an organization's purpose, leaders, people, or work. That's where relational rewards, or non-monetary incentives, come in: this is where employees feel valued, recognized, part of something bigger, not just a cog in the machine, with real opportunities for learning, growth, recognition, and meaningful work, whatever intrinsically motivates them beyond the paycheck. That's why Total Rewards professionals need to stop working in silos and think about how every program, across every center of excellence, adds to that person's overall sense of reward, their career ladder, their pride in the brand, even how marketing represents the company. That's really the employee value proposition. Any day, I'd bank on relational rewards for stickiness and retention, but that doesn't mean financial rewards can be ignored, that's the baseline, straight out of Maslow's hierarchy. The right mix also shifts by career stage: a new graduate will likely prioritize salary and career development, a mid-career professional values flexible work arrangements and leadership development, since they might have kids or aging parents to care for, and someone nearing retirement appreciates retirement benefits. Interestingly, wellness benefits and financial planning tools used to be valued mostly by more senior folks, but today even early-career professionals appreciate them, the world shifted meaningfully after certain global events a few years back.

Sanjeevani: How important is it for companies to clearly communicate their Total Rewards, not just letting employees know a program exists through a bulletin post, but actually helping them understand and appreciate its full value?

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: This connects directly to the "C" in IMPACTFUL, communication, and it's one aspect many of us fail at. In my organization, communication is actually its own center of excellence within HR, and I was genuinely delighted to see that when I joined, I tell my colleagues there that theirs is one of the most important jobs in the whole organization. Communication can't be one-way. Newsletters, town halls, roadshows, all of that matters and is absolutely needed, but the real value comes from two-way communication, real feedback loops. If you act on feedback, great, if you can't implement something, communicate why. Employees are logical, they'll understand if something isn't implemented, as long as they feel heard. That feeling of being heard, not just informed, is what actually determines whether a program lands as worthwhile to people.

Sanjeevani: One thing that keeps HR up at night is retaining top talent. How do you see Total Rewards strategy being used specifically to retain critical talent in such a competitive landscape?

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: This is something we work on daily. Critical talent is highly valued, both inside the organization and constantly sought after externally, so they're always at some risk, and losing them has a much higher impact than losing other roles. From our own internal, data-backed analysis, the cost of proactively retaining someone is far lower than reactively trying to ring-fence them after they've already decided to leave, proactive retention makes people feel genuinely valued, often for less money, while reactive retention, after someone's already handed in their notice, is always more expensive, even if you still do it for a truly critical leadership role. So the starting point is clearly identifying your critical talent and critical roles: who's in them, and what situations put them at risk. Common situations include being underpaid relative to market, or having skills that have genuinely outgrown their current role, which leads to feeling plateaued and under-challenged, since top performers want to be challenged and hold themselves to high standards. Once you've identified these risk categories, you can build levers proactively: mentorship, coaching, promotions, role expansion, job rotation and enrichment, salary correction, long-term incentives, retention bonuses, succession planning, and more recently, something we're still building out, professional branding, helping top talent build visibility as speakers at conferences, publishing white papers, or growing their public professional profile.

As one specific example: an exceptional performer who's underpaid relative to market and a genuine flight risk, market correction is always an option, but it's not the only lever, and it's not always the right one, because anything you do purely on compensation can be matched by another company. Instead, if their intrinsic motivator is autonomy, the ability to set their own targets, you can let them set a target above what their manager would normally require, and attach a multiplier to their variable pay if they hit it. That works because top performers already at their best get genuinely excited by the chance to challenge themselves on their own terms, not everyone responds to this, but many do. For a skill-role mismatch, where someone's ability has outgrown their current role, the natural move is expanding their role, sometimes merging roles entirely, removing the fear of failure from that stretch, and offering things like speaking opportunities at international forums, supporting a white paper, or building their professional brand if a bigger role genuinely isn't available yet.

Sanjeevani: You've shared your thoughts so lucidly, some really practical, HR-friendly approaches. I think you've saved a lot of HR professionals from staying up late worrying about retaining their best people.

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: I don't think that particular worry ever fully goes away for HR when it comes to retaining critical talent, I'd bet on that.

Sanjeevani: As we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts or a message for our listeners, and how can people reach out to you after this episode?

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: Thank you for this podcast opportunity, it's been a pleasure. I want to re-emphasize two things from the framework, and add one more. The two are the "P" and the "C" of IMPACTFUL, Partnership and Communication. Every Total Rewards professional pays attention to the more commonly discussed elements of a framework like this, but the subtlest, most obvious aspects are often what quietly break the best-designed programs. Partnership and communication are two things whose importance should never be discounted. The other thing I'd add is building a culture of iteration. Organizations and employees both keep shifting, so Total Rewards programs can't be a "set it and forget it" exercise, we need a culture of continuously evolving offerings based on employee needs, business objectives, and market trends. If we keep iterating, the program stays fresh, engaging, and effective. Those are the two things I'd want people to take away. As for reaching out, I'm happy to share my LinkedIn profile.

Sanjeevani: Thank you so much, Priyambi, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. For our listeners who'd like to connect with you, I'll share your LinkedIn profile on our podcast page. Thank you again for your time and insights.

Priyambi Chordia Malvai: Thanks for the opportunity, take care.