Palkitsijat – a podcast about rewarding

What is rewarding really about?

Pay concerns everyone who works, yet we rarely stop to think about everything rewarding involves, or why it so often goes wrong in workplaces.

In the opening episode of the series, Minna Nylander and Anu Hakonen lay the foundation. What does the whole of rewarding include beyond monetary pay: benefits, non-financial rewards, opportunities for development? Why is a secure base salary a prerequisite for everything else to work? And why do the effects ultimately arise from people's interpretations rather than from the structure of the system?

That is exactly why the goal is not perfect rewarding but good enough rewarding: the kind that causes no harm and even brings a little bit of joy.

The episode also features two stories about what rewarding feels like when it hits the mark, and when it doesn't.

The series is based on the book Palkitseminen ihmisten johtamisessa ("Rewarding in People Management") and Aalto University's research programme on rewarding. The podcast's production has been funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund.

When does rewarding become truly strategic?

Many organisations invest heavily in developing their strategy, but rewarding may be left somewhat on the sidelines. Yet it is precisely rewarding that tells people what is truly valued at work.

The guest is Kiisa Hulkko-Nyman, who has researched performance-based pay and built reward systems for companies for over twenty years. The episode discusses how rewarding can make strategy visible, and why an outdated system can undermine the very thing it was meant to help succeed.

The key finding of Kiisa's doctoral dissertation runs through the conversation: the effectiveness of rewarding is explained not by the ingenuity of the system, but by people understanding it and experiencing it as fair. Understanding of pay matters more than technique.

It also leads to a practical rule of thumb on the number of metrics in a performance-pay system, and a reminder to management that an incentive system that feels routine to them can look completely different to someone who wasn't involved in building it. The episode also covers how risk-taking in rewarding has changed in recent years.

What does the directive bring that is new?

The Pay Transparency Directive is often discussed in terms of reporting obligations and deadlines. The most essential change easily remains in their shadow.

The guests are Johanna Maaniemi and Sini Jämsén, who have done foundational work in Finland together on evaluating work of equal value. They shift the focus to what is truly new in the directive.

The obligation to pay equal pay for work of equal value is nothing new for us in Finland, but the requirement that pay has a structure and justification is.

Among other things, the episode unpacks what work of equal value means and why it has proved such a difficult question.

One piece of advice runs through the conversation: don't wait for the law. It doesn't create a new obligation, but makes visible whether the justifications are in order, and you can check that yourself right now.

Who dares to make rewarding truly their own?

Rewarding has become a profession of its own in Finland. That is good news: expertise has deepened, and workplaces know more about rewarding than ever. But something else has happened at the same time. Everyone benchmarks everything, and when solutions are measured against what the company next door is doing, building something of your own starts to require justification.

The guest is Roosa Kohvakka, who has looked at rewarding from three angles: as a researcher, as a consultant, and now from inside her employer. She asks her own profession directly what it has done to develop the field, and answers herself: too little.

The episode discusses why rewarding so rarely makes it onto boards' agendas, what responsible rewarding means when it is more than one metric in the executive remuneration scheme, and why the pay transparency discussion easily gets stuck on reporting requirements instead of how people are recruited and promoted.

Roosa also gives instructions on the surest way to fail at rewarding: plan staff rewards in the management team without putting yourself in the employees' position, and ask a consultant for advice but not line managers.