Network Rail bonus culture to continue despite government criticism

Network Rail has revealed that senior managers will collect bonuses next year,despite government criticism.

At the CIPD’s HRD 2009 conference, Marc Auckland, head of leadership and performance at Network Rail, said that the company’s policy to link remuneration with talent management would continue for the foreseeable future.

He told delegates: “Part of the performance targets for senior managers in 2010-2011 will be developing and sharing their staff, and their bonuses will rely on good talent management.”

The transport giant has recently come under fire for its approach to senior remuneration after transport minister Lord Adonis advised that the rail staff’s salaries should be sufficient reward for the jobs they did.

But Auckland said the current approach to remuneration was essential for the company’s talent management projects.

“To ensure there are bridges between HR and the business, we currently link part of senior managers’ bonuses to how many high-potential employees they promote and how many they share with other areas of the business, and this is hugely important to the success of our human capital management programmes,” he said.

Last month, Network Rail chief executive Iain Coucher told Personnel Today he expected the amount of bonuses awarded to be cut this year.

“While we expect all our bonuses to be cut by the remuneration committee this year, for the third year in a row, the truth is that we have massively outperformed our targets and are now looking at linking bonuses directly to passenger satisfaction as well as to our own regulatory targets,” he said.