Bjørn Kjerulf is a seasoned player in the Rewards industry. He started as a student assistant in the 90s conducting his first salary survey from scratch, and since then he’s been a key figure in developing our nerdy niche field from the more transactional Comp & Ben to the growing field of Rewards that we see today. His career encompasses a variety of different angles on Rewards, from a union, to Mercer as a consultant, to Carlsberg and then the past 14 years he has spent with ISS. This is a company with more than 300.000 people and a profit margin just above 5%, so most of the episode is centered around working with Rewards in these conditions.

Spoiler alert: Bjørn begins by telling the story of ISS, incl. their unique company culture and core values; he even takes us through the impact of Covid-19 on their business. He provides examples of the many thousands of lives they touch on a daily basis and the sheer numbers are impressive: more than 100.000 recruitments per year.

At ISS they have two types of employees, Place Makers and Support Staff, the latter is what most companies would refer to as “white collar workers”, and once a year even the top management join the frontline staff as cleaners, etc. to understand the core of their business. Bjørn then continues to explain how their company culture is built on respect and how this also applies to the way they spend their budgets. He explains how they recruit and retain the most brilliant and proficient people possible, and how this makes for a very exciting Rewards environment.

In addition, Bjørn and Jon discuss how being a low profit margin industry impacts the company culture and internal decision-making and salary setting processes.

And of course they also touch upon the EU Pay Transparency Directive and how ISS will handle the implementation of this, including the change management task ahead, the challenges of using Excel as the primary tool and not least the challenge of ensuring pay equity across collective bargaining agreements with the Birmingham case as the worst-case scenario. They discuss the breadth of the project across many functions including HR, Finance and Legal.

CSRD reporting requirements also come up in the discussion, highlighting some of the challenges of reporting globally on fx pay gaps without factoring underlying cultural difference into the numbers, which leads to a chat about which numbers are relevant to compare on a global scale. Finally they philosophize on the future of Rewards post pay transparency.

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