To succeed in the Asian market, companies must invest wisely, establish close partnerships, and adopt a long-term perspective. Inadequate strategies and generic execution often result in multiple unsuccessful attempts to break into new markets, before success is achieved.
One common mistake companies make is imposing global strategies or policies without considering regional nuances. Friction points arise throughout the business, from misaligned sales forecasts to damaging marketing campaigns, uncompetitive partner sales agreements, ignoring regional competitors, and more.
Total Rewards teams also face challenges when implementing programs and initiatives in Asia. Remuneration and Benefits offerings are becoming increasingly personalised, so it follows that it’s a mistake to not factor in regional practices and cultural norms in the build and implementation phases. Close collaboration with regional stakeholders, including at the country level, significantly enhances program success.
Yet even with deep regional engagement by a HQ Rewards team, it’s notoriously hard to ensure that strategic guidance is followed when it matters most. Consider how decision-making typically unfolds in these three challenging scenarios:
- Hiring an executive to lead your China operation
- Retaining a top performer in Japan
- Addressing urgent attrition in India
These strategic People decisions share three characteristics: they have a major impact on the business results, they bring substantial costs (more so if the wrong decision is made), and they almost always demand urgent attention.
During high-stakes moments, strategies, policies, training scenarios, and old lessons learned can be overlooked, as the pressure of the situation and the collective urge to take action takes precedence. Sometimes regional leaders are more inclined to adopt familiar tactics, perhaps from previous organisations or what is seen as normal in their regional market, rather than follow their own organisation’s strategy.
It’s important for global leaders to understand that great strategy is only as good as your organisation’s ability to execute it. True global execution comes over time through the delivery of best practices in all locations, not just at HQ. It takes time for regional leadership team to become cohesive and aligned in purpose such that they can execute strategy consistency. The best business leaders in Asia carefully craft their leadership team for longevity, and invest much effort to build trust and respect among the group. They have a preference for delivering careful strategic evolution, rather than “big bang strategy” because they know it’s more likely to yield success — especially if regional leadership teams are able to provide input that shapes the strategy along the way.
Successful strategic partners, whether in Total Rewards, Finance, or other supporting functions need to engage carefully, investing time and effort to build relationships, understand the regional context, and meet the customer where they are. Strategists that think in the long term and understand and embrace a journey of continuous improvement, shared learning and win/win outcomes find the most success.
Introducing Strategic Pay Decision Coaching
To support you in your journey towards successful Total Rewards deployments and building strong partnerships in Asia, we’ve created a new offering, called Strategic Pay Decision Coaching. This offering is delivered via two ongoing activities:
- We create practical decision making resources to support the critical performance and reward interventions that directly intersect with your pay strategy. These are based on real scenarios that apply to regional leadership teams.
- We provide real-time in-person support to close your pay strategy execution gap. Learnings are used to modify and create new decision making resources.
Examples of decision making resources that we can create and support include:
- Promotion criteria and pay guidance
- Bonus cycle decision criteria, award amounts, and manager talking points
- Equity/stock allocation decision making and leader comms plan
- Counter offer playbook
- Salary increase cycle planning, guidance, and conversation guide
- Executive talking points on pay equity
- Attrition spike research and action plan
- Executive new hire compensation verification and negotiation support
- And more! (let’s discuss possibilities)
Think of this offering as an extension of your global Rewards team, someone who’s embedded with your customer and operates in the intermediary space between policy and execution.