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As workforce expectations diversify, SMGP's Dannie T. Tolarba shares how the company is taking a lifecycle approach to Total Rewards – linking financial security, career growth, wellbeing and recognition to employees’ evolving needs.
Rethinking Total Rewards at San Miguel Global Power (SMGP) began with a simple realisation: a competitive salary could no longer answer all the questions employees had about their working lives.
As the organisation expanded and its workforce became more multigenerational, expectations around employment grew increasingly varied – from financial security and career progression to recognition, wellbeing and longer-term prospects.
Rather than continuing to add benefits to an existing list, the HR team shifted its focus to a broader question: what do employees need at each stage of their careers, and how can Total Rewards support them?
That shift has seen SMGP approach rewards as an employee experience rather than a collection of programmes, while using market data, internal reviews and employee feedback to shape the offering.
The overall approach earned the team a gold win for 'Excellence in Total Rewards Strategy' at the HR Excellence Awards 2026, Philippines. In this edition of Winning Secrets, Dannie T. Tolarba, Group Head, Division Human Resources, Corporate Affairs & Sustainability Management, Safety, Data Privacy Office & Admin Services, SMGP, shares how the power company navigated differing needs across subsidiaries and generations, why communication proved as important as programme design, and more.
Q What was the "lightbulb moment" behind your HR initiative?
As SMGP expanded, competition for technical talent intensified, and our workforce grew considerably more diverse across generations, with each cohort arriving with distinct expectations of what employment ought to provide. It became evident that compensation alone no longer constituted a sufficient proposition, since the questions employees were raising had to do with financial security, career growth, recognition, wellbeing, and where they would stand over a five- or ten-year horizon, none of which a salary figure on its own can answer.
That recognition prompted us to stop treating Total Rewards as an inventory of separate benefits and to approach it instead as a complete employee experience.
The design question changed along with the framing, so that instead of asking which benefits to add, we began asking what employees require at each stage of a career and how a rewards strategy might support them throughout.
Q What was the biggest challenge your team faced, and how did you overcome it?
SMGP operates through multiple subsidiaries, each with its own operational realities, so designing a single rewards framework required standards common enough to hold the organisation together while remaining flexible enough that no business unit was compelled into arrangements unsuited to its context. The multigenerational question compounded the difficulty, since what a newly hired engineer values rarely corresponds to what a twenty-year veteran values, and we relied on market benchmarking and internal reviews to keep those decisions resting on evidence instead of assumption.
Communication was the element we underestimated, because a well-designed programme that employees do not understand delivers very little value, and so we embedded it in leadership discussions, in onboarding, and in a continuous cadence rather than treating it as a single rollout.
Establishing a shared understanding of what those programmes offered proved as demanding as designing them.
Q How has this initiative influenced your people and organisation, and what conversation do you hope it sparks across the HR community?
The movement appeared in our attraction, retention, learning, and internal mobility figures, which indicated that the direction was sound, though the shift in how employees themselves talked about rewards carried just as much weight. Where the conversation had once centered on compensation, it moved toward career growth, financial security, and the long-term prospects available to them here.
For the HR community, our argument concerns how Total Rewards is classified, because many organisations continue to treat it as a cost center, an expense to be managed downward, when our experience points the other way.
Understood as a strategic investment, it preserves institutional knowledge, reduces the time required to fill critical technical roles, and provides the business with a stable foundation for growth.
Q What's next - how are you planning to build on your progress and keep the momentum going?
We are refining our lifecycle-based benefits so that support corresponds to what employees require at each career stage instead of applying uniformly across the organisation, and we are expanding our wellness work with particular attention to mental health and work-life integration. Leadership development and capability-building are being strengthened, and we are broadening internal mobility so that career progression becomes a visible path within the company rather than something employees must leave in order to pursue.
Underlying all of this is a feedback loop of employee input and HR analytics that tells us what is working and what is not, which keeps the strategy from settling into a set of programmes that suited conditions three years ago. We ask of each initiative whether it remains relevant, sustainable, and aligned with the organisation's long-term direction.
Q What do you believe will be the next big opportunity for HR leaders, and how is your organisation preparing for it?
The opportunity lies in personalised, data-driven, and human-centered employee experience, since growing workforce diversity has rendered one-size-fits-all programmes considerably less effective than they once were.
Employees at different life and career stages require different provisions in rewards, well-being, development, and progression, and organisations able to offer that flexibility will hold a genuine advantage in the talent market.
Personalisation at that scale depends on the capacity to identify patterns, which places data and analytics at the center of the work and asks HR to reason from evidence far more readily than has traditionally been the case.
At SMGP we are translating our ESG roadmap into concrete people programs, with the aim of building a workplace that supports employees across their careers while preparing the organization for the challenges ahead.
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets section!
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