Shyam Mohan is a passionate Total Rewards leader with a wide array of experience building and implementing global compensation and benefit programs and solutions.
He brings a strategic focus prioritizing the employee experience while balancing costs and business needs.
He has two Master’s degrees from Rutgers University in Human Resource Management and Employee & Labor Relations.
Shyam started his career at Johnson & Johnson in recruiting, but quickly moved into compensation & HRIS. He then joined Watson Labs, a generics company that was on the cusp of transformative M&A activity. Here he got extensive experience with M&A’s as Watson acquired many companies growing into the multinational generics company, Actavis, and finally acquiring Allergan creating a global brands and generics leader. As the company grew, Shyam’s roles within the company continued to grow and he became a trusted compensation advisor to HR and business leaders.
His time with Allergan culminated with him leading all compensation & benefits activity for the divestiture of the Actavis generics business to Teva. Shyam’s next role was with G&W laboratories where he was charged with leading the design of a Total Rewards operating model, creating a compensation philosophy and structure, and redesigning their HRIS system.
Currently he is the Senior Director of Total Rewards & HRIS at Fragomen where he oversees Total Rewards, performance management and HRIS. In his time, he has developed a new operating model for how Total Rewards provides services to HR and the business and has implemented a global framework for consistent titling and career paths. The recent focus of Shyam and his team has been working to enhance the communication and marketing of Fragomen’s Total Rewards programs in each country to ensure employees are better educated and derive value from all the company’s offerings.
More from Shyam…
Shyam is the Senior Director of Worldwide Total Rewards & HRIS for Fragomen.
Total rewards is a relatively new concept in the U.S., even though we are seeing lots of people with that title these days.
Shyam explained to us in more detail what total rewards is, and why it exists:
“Total rewards is a phrase for compensation. So how you pay your employees base, bonus, stock, long term incentives, if you will. And then on the benefit side, what insurance benefits or perks are you offering to employees and any other type of rewards. So their rewards and recognitions and other types of things.
So the combination of all of that is basically total rewards. I think in the U.S., historically, compensation and benefits was always kept separately. And many times it makes sense to do that, because benefits is really intricate in the U.S. There’s a lot of regulations, there’s a lot of compliance. And just the benefit plans that employers offer are a lot more robust. There’s a lot more work with open enrollment that takes place. So it’s a role in itself that really, you can focus on. So hence, I think compensation was always kept separate from that.
Outside of the U.S., I think, where you have a lot more government and one benefit plan to the benefit side, there’s not as much work so there’s the capacity to potentially have comp and benefits together. So hence, I think total rewards came together earlier outside of the U.S. and now it’s slowly coming into the U.S.
And you see it more so in the U.S. at the higher-level roles. So where you’re leading the total rewards function, because from a strategy standpoint, it’s where do you want to invest your money, right? From a talent perspective, it really makes a lot of sense to look at total rewards across all of the platforms – compensation, benefits, and other rewards and recognition. Because it’s all about where do you want to spend your dollar? Where are you getting the most value for that dollar for an organization?”
