Featured Project –
Citizen Housing

Citizen Housing – Reward Review 

The Challenge

Citizen Housing are one of the UK’s leading social housing organisations.  As part of an ongoing strategy to improve employee engagement, fairness and productivity, Cogito were engaged to undertake a strategic reward review. 

A consultative and evidence based approach was desired to help motivate employees, boost morale, improves attraction & retention and contribute to a productive workplace, with any recommendations to be modern and affordable, conform to the highest levels of equality and diversity and be consistent with competency and behavioural frameworks. 

Our Solution

As part of our comprehensive review of Citizen Housing’s rewards program, we thoroughly analysed the external job market. Our compensation benchmarking exercise helped us compare Citizen salaries with the rates offered by external employers. We also surveyed our internal staff, engaged with important stakeholders, and analysed existing documentation and people strategies. 

This enabled us to develop a detailed plan to enhance the pay and reward system. Our research included: Real-time job openings, Average advertised pay rates and Salary and benefits packages offered by other companies.   

Along with desk research, our research team conducted telephone interviews with individuals with critical job positions in the external market. This helped us gather valuable data on their current pay and benefits and their desired compensation package. We discussed factors they consider important when choosing a new job, such as career development opportunities and company culture. We understand that while salary and benefits are important factors in employee decision-making, other aspects of the Employee Value Proposition, such as career growth and company culture, also significantly attract and retain talent.

We thoroughly analysed various internal resources, including surveys, documents, pay structures, job descriptions, and employee data (such as current salary, grade, and job title). Additionally, we reviewed the People and Organisational Development Strategy, Business Strategy, and existing systems related to pay and rewards, such as performance reviews, expectations, values, and behaviours.  

We surveyed approximately 2,000 employees to gain feedback on the current benefits package and identify the most valued elements. The survey was designed from scratch and tailored to Citizen’s organisational context. The survey results were used to shape the direction of the reward strategy, which led to cost savings where benefits were underutilised.  

For an effective job evaluation scheme, Citizen needed a fair and consistent process that assessed relative role value. In collaboration with Citizen, we conducted a job evaluation for each job role with two evaluators to ensure fairness in a straightforward and easy-to-understand job evaluation method serving as a foundation for other aspects of the People Strategy.

Using the pay data review, in collaboration with the internal team, we talked with relevant stakeholders to unpack the history to determine whether any differences in pay were justifiable and if any account would support the gap. The outcome was a report highlighting potential equal pay issues and recommendations for addressing these uses.     

We presented all our findings regularly throughout the programme and also a final presentation and recommendation session held in person which covered the following topics; the potential for offering new and affordable merit pay practices, such as incentive schemes, to allow employees to earn additional compensation, advising on the creation of a framework that allocates merit increases based on positive behavior and performance levels that align with talent and performance management processes, developing a guide for managers to make fair and consistent pay decisions within the new pay structure, planning for implementation of new provisions, including contract lengths and notice periods, demonstrated flexible benefits platforms with measurable decision-making criteria and ensuring that the EVP (Employee Value Proposition) is embedded within any chosen plans.