'Compensation is just one piece,' says TELUS Health's Joseph De Dominicis
The push to bring employees back into the office is picking up momentum among several organizations, but the debate over whether mandates should also come with better compensation or benefits has yet to be solved.
Amid companies releasing the most recent results on compensation studies, Joseph De Dominicis admits he wasn’t surprised by the latest compensation results released by TELUS Health. After more than four decades of tracking pay trends, he said the story is all-too familiar; salary increases are slowing, though they’re still outpacing inflation.
He linked this moderation to a mix of factors, including the post-COVID “new normal,” cooling inflation, and ongoing economic uncertainty across Canada. For him, the takeaway is that pay can’t be looked at in isolation.
“I think we're seeing a continued slowing of the level of salary increase it but remains above inflation. There’s real salary growth in a way,” said De Dominicis, national consulting leader at TELUS Health. “That highlights the importance of all other aspects of the total rewards package. The compensation is just one piece.”
When asked about whether employers should offer compensation or other benefits if mandating return to office policies, he was cautious about making broad claims, emphasizing that each industry and geography faces its own realities. Still, De Dominicis acknowledged TELUS Health’s decisions are always rooted in data.
He also acknowledged that “optionality has value,” arguing that employees today evaluate the entire rewards package, not just pay, and flexibility has become a central piece of that. For De Dominicis, a meaningful rewards package goes far beyond base salary.
While he acknowledged that pay remains “a huge part,” employees are also weighing benefits, retirement plans, well-being supports, and even non-cash elements like discounts, social impact initiatives, and peer support.
“Whether you want to come into work every day or you prefer to stay home every day or something in the middle, the option based on your situation has value,” he said, adding that choice can weigh just as heavily as compensation when workers compare employers.
“All of that makes up a total rewards package from an employee perspective,” he added, emphasizing that workers today are savvy enough to assess all those components when making career decisions.
For him, the challenge for employers is balancing the essentials with the extras.
“How do we build a total package that includes those necessary pieces that have been there for ages, and then some of these important pieces that employees value?” he said, also noting that an employer’s approach to return-to-office policies is increasingly viewed as part of that package.
While De Dominicis avoided sharing the exact details of Telus Health’s compensation package, he said the company evaluates its competitiveness holistically, considering salary, pensions, and benefits together “in totality.”
Yet, he described TELUS Health’s rewards strategy as "a blend of many elements" but stressed that flexibility is at the core. For example, giving employees choice around office attendance, he said, is central to how they approach engagement.
But whether that approach will last is being countered by others. For Joe Nunes, executive chairman at Actuarial Solutions Inc., however, he argues whether it’s truly necessary to bring people back to the office, and how compensation fits into that.
He believes larger companies, especially those in big cities, are facing the greatest challenges because some remote workers simply aren’t productive.
“[Employers] can’t come up with a better solution than make everyone come here so we can look at them working and almost force productivity upon them,” he said. Contrastingly, in his own 12-person firm, transparency makes flexibility easier to manage.
He was quick to point out that downtown salaries have long been tied to commuting and living costs, so it’s natural that some remote workers might accept less, while others may demand higher pay to return downtown.
Yet, Nunes pushed back on the idea that pay should be strictly tied to where someone lives. For him, it’s more about supply and demand than geography. In his view, compensation should be based on the value a candidate brings and what it takes to attract them, not a rigid formula tied to jurisdiction.
Additionally, he believes incentives to return to the office should be framed around growth and advancement rather than blanket mandates and employees who insist on staying fully remote send a message about their level of commitment. As a result, organizations should respond accordingly.
De Dominicis argued that employers have a role to play in helping staff feel more in control of their financial lives, whether through budgeting tools, retirement planning, or employee assistance programs. By providing that kind of support, he argued organizations can ease financial anxiety and give workers a stronger sense of stability.
Beyond traditional pay and benefits, he stressed that culture-driven elements carry equal weight.
“In addition to the flexibility and peer support, social impact are big parts of our ethos and philosophy, giving back to the communities that we’re in,” he noted, adding for TELUS Health, those factors directly tie into employee engagement – a key metric they monitor closely.
“We believe the flexibility and the optionality for employees around the office attendance mandates and that kind of thing and having a complete sort of hybrid approach actually drives engagement,” he explained.
Nunes believes the future will belong to organizations that make flexibility and engagement central to their strategy.
“The organizations that are going to win over the next few decades are going to be the ones that engage workers and meet them where they need to be met in terms of flexibility and work-life balance,” he said.
He predicted that companies relying on rigid mandates will struggle to hold onto talent.
“We will slowly see employees migrate out of the big companies that mandate a way to do it,” said Nunes.
“The race is on.”
