What are the most significant challenges facing reward professionals today?

The defining challenge I keep hearing is a squeeze from both ends. The cost of employing people has stepped up materially, with the National Insurance rise, climbing PMI premiums and more besides. At the same time, thanks to AI, employees are more discerning than ever, while frozen thresholds and the cost of living quietly erode their real pay.

So reward teams are being asked to make people feel better off, having less to do it with, and in front of a sharper-eyed audience.

What excites you most about participating in Reward & Payroll Summit this year?

I’m looking forward to hearing what reward teams are wrestling with on the ground, which is usually more nuanced than it looks from the outside, and this year especially, with everything going on, I expect those conversations to be particularly interesting. What I most enjoy is when someone explains how they solved a seemingly small or esoteric problem and the fix turns out to carry a much broader lesson.

The panel is part of that for me too. I’ll be there to make a case on uptake, and to talk about how we do things at DASH, but I’m just as interested in what the rest of the room makes of it, and what questions come up.

Which session or theme are you most looking forward to, and why?

That’s a tough one. I’m torn between "Confidence Under Pressure: Confronting the Imposter Saboteur in Leadership" and "Designing Reward for the Future Workforce: Using Personas to Build Pay & Reward That Lasts".

I’m very much a "confidence player" and struggle without it, so getting better at managing that appeals to me personally. Equally, we regularly test our platform against different employee personas, to make sure we’re catering for as broad a range of people as possible, so I’m keen to see how others approach it, and whether there are personas we’ve overlooked or not thought through as deeply as we should have.

What’s a common misconception people have about Doing more with less: Maximising Reward impact, and how does your session challenge that?

The big misconception is that uptake is simply a function of communication, that you fix it with more emails, a louder launch, a better-looking benefits portal. I don’t think it usually is.

In my experience people tend to know a benefit is there. They just don’t use it, because the journey is awkward, or they’re being asked to commit beyond what they’re comfortable with, or to act at a moment that doesn’t suit them. You can’t communicate your way out of a benefit that’s hard to use, or force people to act at a time that doesn’t work for them. Cycle to Work is a prime example of all this.

So the point I’ll be pushing on the panel is that low uptake is mostly a product and friction problem, wrongly dressed up just as an awareness problem. Make the thing easy to use, relevant to more people, and put it in front of them at the moment it’s useful, and uptake tends to follow.

How does Doing more with less: Maximising Reward impact connect to broader organisational strategy or business performance?

In our world, benefits are one of the clearest ways an organisation shows it has thought carefully about its people: that it’s paid attention, helped them to something they couldn’t easily get on their own, or shared the load in a hard moment. Done well, it fosters a real sense of togetherness, that the place is looking out for you, and that is what keeps people turning up and performing at their best over sustained periods.

But that multiplier, happier, healthier, more productive people, only comes from benefits that people both use and value, and the two aren’t the same thing. Some get high uptake but little real impact, the sort people would barely miss if they vanished. Others have low uptake but matter enormously to the few who use them.

So maximising reward impact, and the performance that flows from it, isn’t about offering more, and it isn’t only about uptake. It’s about working out which benefits matter most to people, and getting those into as many hands as possible. That’s the difference between a reward package that reads well on a careers page and one that changes how people feel about coming to work.

What do you hope attendees will take away from your session at Reward & Payroll Summit?  

A clearer sense of who they’re competing with for employees’ attention, why getting people to use their benefits matters so much, and some practical ways to make it happen.

If people walk away able to look at a benefit with stubbornly low uptake, or one that isn’t delighting the people who do use it, and identify the real culprit, that’s a good hour on a panel.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in reward over the next 2–3 years?

I’ll stick to benefits here. The thing that frustrates me most is latency: you decide to sign up for something, then can’t get what you signed up for until the following month, sometimes the one after. That has to end.

More broadly, anything that lets employees act as individuals, on their own timing, rather than being held to organisation-level processes and windows, will be valuable. People make these decisions in the moment, and the benefit should be there in the moment too.

What’s one thing you’re hoping to learn from other speakers at the summit?

What it would take to get them all cycling to work!

On a more serious note, I’d like to learn how reward teams read the data to separate two things: benefits with high uptake but low impact, the ones people would barely miss if they vanished, from benefits with low uptake but high impact, where the few who use them would be lost without them. Take-up alone won’t tell you which is which, and getting better at spotting the difference is the thing I’d most like to take away.

Coffee or tea before your big session at The Reward and Payroll Summit?

Coffee please (flat white, if you’ve got it!)

Find out more about Jamie’s session, Doing more with less: Maximising Reward Impact, and everything else on offer at The Reward and Payroll Summit 2026 - Click here to find out more