Compensation, Benefits and Total Rewards
You raised salaries and the people you were worried about left anyway. Or the healthcare invoice went up again and the staff survey still lists healthcare as a dissatisfier. Or someone asked what the total cost of employing a Band 4 actually is, and assembling the answer took two days and produced a number nobody fully trusted.
These are total reward questions, and they behave differently from salary questions. Salary is one line. Total reward is what the organisation spends and what the employee perceives, and those two figures are often far apart in ways nobody has measured.
Where this sits relative to job architecture
Worth being clear, because the two are frequently conflated.
Job architecture is about structure: how roles are levelled, what the grades are, where the bands sit, how somebody moves from one to the next and on what evidence. That is a separate discipline and we run it as a separate engagement.
This page is about the package: what sits on top of and around base pay, what it costs, whether it is compliant, and whether it is doing anything for you. The two engagements complement each other and are often run in sequence, but they answer different questions and you may only need one.
What we cover
Total reward audit. Every element of the package priced and laid out in one view. Base, allowances, thirteenth month or bonus where applicable, retirement provision, healthcare, insurance, leave, loans and any element that has accreted informally and is now treated as an entitlement. Most organisations are surprised by the total and more surprised by the distribution, because spend has usually followed history rather than intent.
Benefits and healthcare review. Healthcare is often the second largest line after payroll and the least actively managed. We review scheme design, plan tiering, enrolment accuracy, which is a common source of waste, utilisation against spend, and provider performance. Where a transition between providers is warranted we manage it, including the enrolee mapping and the transition period, which is where these exercises usually go wrong and generate a wave of complaints that undo the saving.
Allowance rationalisation. Housing, transport, meal, utility and the various items that have attached themselves to particular roles over the years. The questions are whether the structure still reflects how people work, whether it is defensible across comparable roles, and whether it is being treated correctly for tax. Rationalisation needs care: allowances are contractual in effect even when they were introduced informally, and unilateral withdrawal creates real exposure. We sequence these changes so that they are lawful and survivable.
Mandatory elements and tax treatment. Every Nigerian employer carries a set of contributions it does not get to design, and they are a material share of the cost of employment. We confirm the position is correct and current, then set it alongside the discretionary elements so that you are looking at one number rather than a payroll line and a benefits line that nobody has ever added together.
Benchmarking and communication. External comparison against a defined market, which needs to be defined honestly, because benchmarking against the multinational in your sector when you are not competing for the same candidates produces a number that helps nobody. Then total reward statements, so that individual employees can see what is being spent on them.
Three findings that recur
We are not promising you these. They are simply the three that come up most often in Nigerian organisations of between fifty and five hundred people, and they are worth checking yourself before you engage anybody.
The first is enrolment drift on healthcare. People leave and are not removed. Dependants are added and never verified. Plan tiers were assigned when the organisation had a different shape and nobody has revisited them. The invoice grows every year and the growth is attributed to medical inflation, which is real but is rarely the whole of it. A clean enrolment reconciliation is unglamorous work and frequently pays for the engagement on its own.
The second is that the most expensive element of the package is the one employees value least, and the cheapest is the one they value most. Retirement provision is a large, mandatory, invisible cost that almost nobody mentions in an exit interview. Something small and discretionary, handled well, shows up in every conversation. Spend has usually been allocated by obligation and precedent rather than by anything anyone has actually asked employees about.
The third is that comparable people are on materially different packages for reasons that made sense at the time of hiring and cannot be explained now. This is the finding that most often turns a total reward review into a job architecture conversation, because you cannot resolve it fairly without a structure to resolve it against.
How engagements run
A total reward audit for a mid-sized organisation runs four to six weeks and produces a written report with a costed set of recommendations. Benefits and healthcare work can be scoped on its own where that is the pressing issue. Implementation support, including any provider transition, is quoted separately in NGN once the scope of change is known.
Where this connects
If the underlying complaint is that pay feels arbitrary, the fix is structural and sits with job architecture and pay progression rather than here. If reward is not connected to any assessment of contribution, performance management is the missing piece. And where a change to the package needs to be documented and communicated properly, HR policy development covers the instrument that makes it stick.
To discuss a review, email consulting@sahrpartners.com or use the enquiry form.