HR Works 121: How Rewards Can Prevent Layoffs in a Crisis

The early effects of the pandemic on the workforce saw many businesses close, and many others take extreme measures to survive, including downsizing, cutting pay, and reducing or eliminating benefits. Our guests today believe that getting a better handle on your people costs and benefits can help organizations be less draconian in their approach to surviving the ongoing pandemic. We are pleased to have Peter Newhouse with us in this episode. Peter joined Unilever (https://www.unilever.com/) in September 2010 as Global Head of Reward and a member of the Unilever HR Leadership Team, having previously worked as a senior executive at Ford in North America and as Group Head of Remuneration at Standard Chartered Bank in London.  Having graduated with a Law degree, Peter started his career in Reward in 1980 when he joined the American consulting company Organization Resources Counselors Inc (ORC). As well as developing the Reward consultancy services of MM&K, specialists in executive and incentive compensation, Peter has also run his own Reward consulting business, Peter Newhouse & Co.  We also have with us today Ken Charman. He is the CEO of uFlexReward (https://www.uflexreward.com/), an HR and rewards data platform that collates all costs to do with employees (salary, pension, bonus, shares, etc) into one real-time platform. Ken has been involved in major enterprise software projects since 1987, specifically in financial consolidation and reporting systems, and has built high-performance teams in IT start-ups that were acquired by Oracle, SAP, IBM and Sungard.