Don’t Just Reward Results – Reward What You Want More Of
You don’t drive culture change with posters on the wall. You do it with what you reward in the halls.
In most organizations, rewards are viewed through a familiar lens: incentivize performance, reinforce outcomes, celebrate success. But what if that lens is too narrow? What if rewards are more than just a response to performance, but a powerful lever to shape the very culture you want to build?
Total rewards is often treated as a back-office function—important, but downstream. But if you're serious about culture change, behavior shifts, or future readiness, Total Rewards belongs at the strategy table, not just the HR dashboard.
From Performance Management to Culture Engineering
Don’t expect people to change if the system still rewards them to stay the same.
Traditionally, rewards have been used to reinforce performance. Do the job, hit your goals, and be rewarded. But performance alone is not the whole story. The modern workplace runs on behaviors - on how people collaborate, take initiative, and engage with change.
This is where the future is headed: not just what people achieve, but how they work, grow, and experiment.
Organizations now want to see more of:
Discretionary effort and initiative
AI adoption and digital tool usage
Cross-functional teaming
Continuous skill development
Internal mobility and self-driven learning
The challenge? Most traditional rewards systems are not built to incentivize these behaviors. They’re optimized for stability, not agility. But what you reward is what scales. And if you want to shape behavior, you need to architect rewards systems that make desired actions visible, valuable, and repeatable.
Rewards Are a Cultural Message
Whether we realize it or not, rewards send a message about what matters. If you only reward outcomes, you may miss the process that drives innovation. If you only reward the loudest contributors, you may ignore the collaborators and quiet builders who are holding the team together.
If you want to encourage a culture of experimentation, you have to reward experimentation, not just success. If you want to promote internal mobility, you have to remove disincentives for leaving one role to grow into another.
In other words, don’t just reward the result - reward the behavior you want to see more of.
The Role of Total Rewards Leaders is Evolving
In some organizations, performance management sits inside the Total Rewards function, and that’s more than just an org chart detail. It reflects a growing awareness that performance, behavior, and rewards are interconnected levers in driving cultural change.
When aligned, this setup empowers Total Rewards leaders to be more than policy experts. They become culture architects. Instead of simply managing benefits and comp bands, they’re designing the systems that influence how people learn, grow, experiment, and thrive.
A future-ready Total Rewards strategy means:
Embedding desired behaviors into incentive structures
Aligning reward systems with transformation goals
Flexing rewards to drive learning, growth, and adaptability
Viewing recognition as a tool for visibility and belonging
Incentivize the Future, Not the Past
If your rewards system is based on what worked five years ago, you’ll continue to reinforce a culture from five years ago. But the companies that thrive now, and in the decade ahead, are those that use rewards to drive transformation.
Want people to get curious about AI? Reward AI curiosity.
Want more peer-to-peer collaboration? Reward the connectors, not just the closers.
Want more people to invest in developing their skills? Make learning a promotable behavior.
This isn’t about throwing money at problems. More so, it’s about repositioning rewards as a lever for influence - one that’s capable of nudging behaviors, amplifying values, and scaling culture.
Cultivate empowers organizations to not just adapt to change, but to lead in shaping the future of work. Let us help you build a thriving culture now — send us a message.
