'This was going to be really different from the culture we had been before'
One of the secrets to great employee engagement and experience is finding a way to honour and thank workers for a job well done.
One major Canadian energy company was recently recognized for a program that encourages employees to give colleagues cash rewards.
At the 10th annual Canadian HR Awards, TransAlta received an Excellence Award for Best Rewards & Recognition Strategy.
In this episode of Canadian HR Reporter TV, Tawnie Dahl, TransAlta’s Director of Executive Compensation & Total Rewards, discusses her organization’s decision to implement a culture transformation strategy and how its “Boost and Bold” reward programs have fuelled TransAlta’s success.
Major transformation to way of operating
The company’s current success began with a decision made about five years ago to shift its business from a producer of energy using coal to one that focused on becoming a green business.
And it began with a radical shift in TransAlta’s corporate culture, according to Dahl.
“We were really, really focused on orders and results. We were highly interdependent culture, with a really strong orientation on predictability, caution, and planning. So to shift the culture to the clean-energy world, we knew we needed to focus on some different things in our culture so we wanted to shift to focus on results, purpose, and learning; really more of an outcome-based, purposeful culture that values individual contributions, experimentation, creativity, learning and engagement,” says Dahl.
“This was going to be really different from the culture that we had been before.”
After the company completed efforts to make the sea change by “mothballing” some operations and slashing expenses — including in HR — the focus shifted to creating a new incentives program, she wsays.
“In 2021, we created a focus to a new total rewards team, to really focus on understanding how to compete for employees in the renewable energy business. We needed to attract a different skill-set, and frankly, a different generation of employees with different needs and desires than our traditional workforce has seen,” says Dahl.
Many employer are shifting from salary and benefits, to a total-rewards outlook, when it comes to a compensation strategy, found a report.
The birth of ‘boost bucks’
Eventually, the “boost” program was implemented to great success.
“It’s a peer-to-peer recognition program that provides our employees with what we call ‘boost bucks.’ Every quarter, every employee gets a small pot of ‘boost bucks,’ and we ask them to reward their peers and colleagues for displaying the behaviours that directly support the five pillars of our culture transformation. It really allows employees to decide who they want to recognize.”
“Employees then decide who receives recognition, who are displaying the culture and the attributes that we’re looking for. They accumulate and then can spend those ‘boost bucks’ on a gift card with popular retailers, including Amazon in a reward marketplace,” says Dahl.
