Total Reward Management: How Benefits and Incentives insights strengthen your reward strategy

The days of making reward decisions using salary benchmarking alone are over. 

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If you’ve ever lost a strong candidate to a competitor, or struggled to justify a compensation recommendation to leadership, you’ll know how frustrating it is to work with only part of the picture.

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Base salary still matters, but it’s rarely the full story. Performance bonuses, shift allowances and remote working expectations can meaningfully change what a role is worth in the market.

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That’s why HR DataHub is building a clearer, faster starting point for total rewards benchmarking.

Right now, we provide insights into three key incentives:

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• Performance bonus indicators
  
  
• Shift allowance indicators
  
  
• Remote working indicators
  
  

This is just the starting point of a broader total reward view, with additional benefits insights planned for release across 2026.

The Hidden Risks of Incomplete Total Reward Benchmarking

Picture a familiar scenario:

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You’ve found a salary benchmark for a critical role and feel confident about the base pay recommendation…until leadership asks:

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• “Are organisations paying performance bonuses for roles like this?”
  
  
• “Do we need to factor in night shift or weekend premiums?”
  
  
• “How common is remote working for this type of role, and does it influence pay by location?”
  
  

When those questions come up, a base-salary benchmark quickly feels incomplete, and therefore the total reward value you’re offering.

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Without these insights, HR teams are left relying on assumptions. This can lead to:

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• Under-pricing roles where incentives are the norm
  
  
• Over-inflating base salaries unnecessarily
  
  
• Weak reward business cases that don’t stand up to scrutiny
  
  
• Missed signals about how work patterns are changing in your sector
  
  

Introducing Total Reward Incentive Insights on HR DataHub

HR DataHub now gives you market benchmarking on three key incentives, helping you move beyond base pay only and towards a more complete total reward picture. 

Performance Bonus Indicators

You can see how commonly performance bonuses appear in job postings by role, and how that prevalence changes over time. This helps you evaluate whether bonuses are becoming a market expectation or remain a differentiator within your total reward strategy. 

Shift Allowance Indicators

For shift-based roles, you can benchmark how frequently shift allowances are referenced in comparable job adverts. This is especially valuable in healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality and other operational sectors where unsocial hours are often part of the role and a core part of the total reward offer.

Remote Working Indicators

Remote working insights show the percentage of job postings that explicitly stipulate remote working for the roles you are benchmarking.

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Used alongside HR DataHub’s location filters, this gives you a clearer picture of:

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• How common remote roles are for a given benchmark
  
  
• How remote roles are being paid in different parts of the country
  
  
• Whether pay patterns vary between predominantly remote vs on-site markets
  
  

This supports more realistic decision-making for your remote work strategies.

New: Benefits & Incentives Overview Graph

To make these insights easier to interpret and present, HR DataHub now includes a Benefits & Incentives Overview graph within benchmark results.

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This overview provides, for each benchmarked role:

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• Prevalence (%) of performance bonus, shift allowance and remote working indicators
  
  
• Trends over time for each incentive
  
  
• Top industries associated with each incentive
  
  
• Top keywords appearing in job adverts for each incentive
  
  

In short: it gives you a fast, visual understanding of how incentives show up in the market, where they are most common, and how they’re evolving as part of the wider total reward landscape. 

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And this is just the starting point.

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For deeper analysis, you can download the data to see the underlying detail of what employers are offering and how they describe it in job postings.

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This lets you move from a high-level market view to practical insights, such as how to structure incentives for a role, or how to position offers more competitively.

Why These Insights Matter Now

1. Total rewards expectations are critical in some industries

Incentives such as performance bonuses, shift premiums and remote working are not “nice-to-haves” in many sectors — they’re core to how roles are priced and perceived. 

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For example, bonuses can be a key expectation in sales, finance and professional services; shift allowances are often fundamental in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and hospitality; and remote working prevalence increasingly shapes competitiveness in tech and white-collar roles across the UK. 

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In these contexts, if you’re only looking at base salary, you’re only seeing part of the real total reward value of the job.

2. Better modelling means better budgeting

When budgets are tight, organisations need to understand the trade-offs between base salary and incentives. Incentive benchmarking helps you shape competitive packages without defaulting to base-pay inflation.

3. Stronger reward conversations with leadership

With prevalence data and trends, you can clearly explain:

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• What the market is doing
  
  
• How incentives contribute to role value
  
  
• Why your reward strategy is competitively positioned
  
  

The result is a more defensible, evidence-based total reward approach.

The Strategic Advantage of Benchmarking Beyond Salary

When organisations benchmark base salary alone, they miss critical signals about what actually makes an offer competitive.

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By adding bonus, shift, and remote working incentive insights HR DataHub helps you build total reward strategies that are:

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• more competitive
  
  
• more accurate
  
  
• more defensible
  
  
• better aligned with modern work patterns
  
  

If you’re ready to move beyond base pay comparisons and take your first step towards full total rewards benchmarking, we’d love to show you how. See the full range of features and book a demo of HR Datahub, here.

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