Thomson Reuters today is a technology company, combining the data, intelligence and solutions professionals need to make informed decisions, all while maintaining the trust that has defined it for generations. In this conversation, Matt Selley, Global Head of Total Reward, reflects on what that means for the Reward function: the structural reforms, the equity expansion that’s reshaping how thousands of people relate to the business, and what he’s learned about influencing C-suite stakeholders in a company where the stakes are high and the language must be right. Matt also shares his views on AI’s impact on the Reward profession, and the question he’s not sure any of us can fully answer yet.
—-
MS: Thomson Reuters is a company most people think they know. Reuters, a world-leading provider of journalism and news, is iconic and deservedly so. But the Thomson Reuters business is much broader than that. For a very long time, we’ve been providing authoritative content and expertise to professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance and government. If you walked into a law firm 20 years ago and saw walls covered in legal books, a significant part of that was us. What’s changing is how we deliver that content and what we enable our customers to do with it. Thomson Reuters today is focused on powering those business-critical professions with AI they can trust for their high-stakes work. Not all AI is built in the same way and it cannot be held to a single standard, and our differentiation is Fiduciary-Grade AI. This is AI built on authoritative content, domain expertise, data governance and customer support, specifically for high-stakes professions such as legal or tax where being almost right isn’t good enough. This focus changes the nature of the talent we need, and it changes the nature of the companies we’re acquiring. We’ve been quite acquisitive, bringing in technology businesses that range from a handful of people to several hundred. And that’s really the core of why I’m here. The Reward proposition has to evolve alongside all of that.
MS: I think Reward has to be in lockstep with the organisation’s strategy, both its talent strategy and where the organisation is going as a whole. It needs to fit, it needs to be consistent, and you don’t want to see mismatches between those things. If I think about examples, the acquisitions are a good one. Thomson Reuters has made important acquisitions in recent years, including some small and early-stage technology startup companies. Those bring not just products but some really fantastic talent, people who are core to those products and their development. And the way Reward works in those firms can be very different from how a 27,000-person global public company typically operates. So to capitalise on the value that talent brings, we have a responsibility to be adaptable. You need to go to those people and talk their language. But the trick is doing that without losing the core principles, the sound governance that really matters in a big public company. Sometimes it’s about applying the arrangements you already have and establishing where there’s a sound rationale to vary them. Sometimes it’s doing something new. But a lot of it is just doing a good job of positioning and explaining the advantages of what your existing proposition already brings. And sometimes it’s being humble enough to ask whether a 35-person startup is doing something that a company of our size could learn from.
MS: This is probably one of the more significant changes of the last couple of years. Three years ago, the number of employees in our annual equity plans was quite small. What we’ve done since is expand that materially, many multiples of the original size. There’s an all-employee share purchase plan, but by expanding our annual Long Term Incentive participation, the number of people with a genuine and material stake in the company’s overall performance looks very different from what it was. The rationale matters here. We have a lot of people, particularly in our technology and product businesses, who are absolutely focused on one product and one area. The equity expansion means that someone working on a tax product also has a stake in the legal business and in the overall group performance. It makes the “one company” principle feel real rather than just rhetorical. And it responds to a talent market reality: in the technology sector, equity exposure runs much deeper into organisations than in a traditional corporate. If we’re competing for that talent, we need to reflect that. We have had great support on this investment from the top down. I think it’s made a genuine difference.
MS: The easy route when you’re running a salary review across a business of this size is to say: the US budget is 3%, you all have 3%, go. Fine, easy, and not actually appropriate given the underlying nature of the labour market. What we moved to was a much more differentiated approach, directing investment to where the competitive pressure on talent is sharpest and where growth is fastest. That means some managers received budgets that were different from those they might have expected. It’s a difficult message to land well and constructively, and what I’m most proud of on behalf of the whole team who worked on that transformation is the communication. We rooted everything in the business strategy and in messages our senior leadership had already been sharing consistently. This wasn’t HR doing something out of the blue. Out of roughly 4,000 managers going through that process, we had nine queries about budgets, all answered by reference to the briefings we’d already delivered. That’s the outcome you’re aiming for.
MS: Yes, and this one is more structural, less visible, and probably more interesting for that reason. It’s the classic tension in compensation between broad pay bands and granular job-level structures. Our assessment was that aggregated ranges weren’t serving us well anymore. In a split-speed market, throwing a wide range of roles into the same broad bucket and giving them the same treatment doesn’t really work. So we’re rolling out a much more granular, targeted structure: in phases, but moving quickly. The early results are telling. Fewer exceptions, fewer iterations on offers, talent acquisition moving faster and with more confidence. The head of one of our businesses said they hadn’t really noticed until we presented the data, and the feedback was simply that we’d vastly reduced the friction in the system, enabling our recruiters and leaders to move faster. It’s not glamorous. But simple isn’t always easy, and making something work seamlessly is actually quite hard. That’s where the real value lies.
MS: I’m not someone who can sell sand in the Sahara. That’s really not me. What’s going to work in that environment is making sure I’m talking about a business need that is already understood and important to that group. There’s a danger of falling into the trap of having a solution that’s looking for a problem. However ingenious it is, that’s not going to get you attention in a competitive business where people have a thousand things to do. So the first step is always the why. If they need to know about something and just don’t yet, that’s where you start. Not with the solution to a problem they don’t yet know they have. Once the why is established, then you can move to the what. And when you do, I think it continues to be really powerful to ground the proposal in concrete commercial facts: the company’s strategy, its talent priorities, and what you’re actually seeing in practice. Market data is invaluable, but walking in and saying “the market data says we need to do X” is, in my experience, a very fast route to a difficult conversation. It feels theoretical, detached from the complex reality of running a business. Use it as support, not as justification. The other investment that pays off is the relationships you build before you need them. In a global business, you’re not going to run into a senior leader at the coffee machine. It has to be deliberate. For me, that means direct conversations with business leaders and their teams, and building genuinely close working relationships with the HR Business Partners who are embedded with those leaders day to day. They’re trailing them around the world. They know what matters, what the pressures are, and what language lands. Getting close to those people isn’t optional.
MS: AI is obviously top of mind, and I think about it from a particular vantage point. I work at a company that’s at the forefront of applying AI to provide solutions for people who cannot afford to be wrong. That’s the context I’m sitting in every day. For the Reward profession specifically, I think we’re still scratching the surface of understanding what it changes. The foundational technical work, the data wrangling, the modelling, and the market analysis, a lot of that is going to be executed faster and better by the technology. And that raises a question I don’t think anyone has fully answered yet: how do you develop the next generation of Reward professionals if the work that traditionally built their technical instincts is increasingly automated? I use the analogy of calculators and maths. The teachers who told you that you needed to understand the underlying maths before you could trust the calculator were right. If you don’t know enough to look critically at what the technology hands back to you, then we’re all in a world of trouble. The foundational knowledge still matters. But I do think the days of building a Reward career primarily on Excel and data wizardry are probably numbered. Technical competence will be necessary. I’m just not sure it will remain sufficient on its own. What I’ve said to my own analysts is that the automation creates capacity, not redundancy. There are things we should be doing for a business of this size and complexity that we simply don’t have the bandwidth for right now. The technology should free up good people to do more of that: the judgement, the creativity, and the genuine business partnership. That’s the opportunity. I think it’s a real one.
If you would like to take part in the Total Reward discussion series, get in touch and let’s explore a conversation from your perspective.
