Using data to answer four key questions about benefits engagement

The employee-employer relationship is changing. Employees believe their organisation should understand them like they do their consumers and their compensation package should uniquely reflect their needs.

Employers are rising to this challenge, transforming data into insights which expose greater personalisation opportunities in their reward offering; ultimately with the objective of bolstering talent retention strategies and optimising benefit programmes.

Until recently, benefits systems have remained a relatively untapped, but rich, resource. A problem born from the historic disparate nature of benefit solutions; often deployed with a mixture of manual and inconsistent software solutions in each country. The move to centralise this data in a single global benefit management solution provides employers with the unprecedented opportunity to harmonise benefit data and drive strategic changes at a global or in-country level.

Such opportunities allow HR teams to take a data-led approach that can help answer four important questions:

1) How do I optimise my benefit spend?

Benefits data analysis can generate significant cost savings for employers. On average, employers spend around 30% of basic pay on benefits and other cash incentives, and as such, having a detailed understanding of this spend is critical.

Having an overview of spend and benefits uptake by region and country can easily highlight where a strategy is failing to deliver strong ROI. For example, is there inconsistency in benefit costs for similar benefits in different countries? If so, do employees in a higher cost country value their benefit more? If not, are there other benefits, or different ways to fund benefits, which reduce the reliance and subsequent cost of the benefit? Such scrutiny can deliver significant cost savings and also provide benefits which are more appropriate to employees’ needs.

Data can also help reward professionals predict benefits spend for prospective employees. At present this largely remains unknown until the new starter’s arrival. But data could be used to develop benefits profiles for certain demographics, enabling employers to easily plan budgets or understand the impact of expanding operations in certain markets.

2) Are you engaging?

Our research indicates that 30% of global companies are struggling with employee engagement. By analysing trends in benefits take-up, employers can identify the types of benefits that appeal most to their employees, enabling them to adapt their strategies accordingly. As a result, employees should feel better understood and more appropriately rewarded – with a positive impact likely on their own engagement levels, the service they provide, customer satisfaction and business revenue.

3) Are your communications effective?

Analytics can help businesses to develop targeted strategies for communicating their benefits offerings. For example, employers can use data to deduce when employees are most engaged with their benefits packages, enabling them to target communications to certain times of day.

This is of particular importance for employees that do not have access to a computer at work, such as those in the retail or manufacturing sectors.

Data can also be used to assess the effectiveness of communications strategies. For example, if an HR team runs a wellbeing campaign, and they do not see a positive data correlation with healthcare benefits uptake, a problem may well lie in their communications strategy.

4) Are your benefits competitive?

Employers can use big data to compare their own benefits offering against competitor offerings. Historically, this type of insight would only have been available through consultancy services, but many of our clients are starting to show an interest in the comprehensive benefits concept, recognising that it operates by mutual exchange.

This means that if you are willing to share your own data anonymously, big data offers the possibility to receive invaluable insight into competitors’ employee value propositions on a self-service basis.

The possibilities presented by benefits data are endless – and its analysis needn’t be an arduous process.

Brenden Mielke is director of product management at Thomsons Online Benefits.

This article was provided by Thomsons Online Benefits.