4 steps to putting 'amazing' into your benefits
Do they achieve the objectives of creating happiness and engagement with your staff, making them believe and feel that you’ve taken the time to put in place benefits which haven’t been taken off of a shelf but have been developed just for them?
A study recently conducted by Chase de Vere in conjunction with Lightbulb, found that many UK companies do not believe their benefits are effective, with only 42% saying their benefits package helps recruit and retain the best quality staff, so 58% saying they do not.
We asked ourselves this question when we conducted our global benefits review recently. Did we have the ‘right’ benefits in place to amaze and delight our employees, helping us to recruit, retain and engage them? The answer to the question was yes and no, some were but some were not, and we definitely needed more work to make our overall strategy 'amazing'. So we set off to fix this...
I thought I’d share with you the steps we took, which may help you the next time you conduct a benefits review:
1) Answering the basics
The first step in our benefits review was to start with the basics, answering these key strategic questions:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- What are we trying to say to our employees through our benefits?
- What do our benefits say about us to the external world?
It is absolutely critical to start with this, for as you’ll see, they lay the foundation for the remainder of our benefits review, setting our strategic objectives and giving us focus and direction.
2) Set core benefit principles
After answering these questions we next moved to setting our core benefit principles. We spent a lot of time developing these. In fact if I look back at our first version compared to our final version, they were completely different.
The reason for this is that we kept going back to the strategy and how we answered the basic questions as well as looking at how they would support and align with our values and culture.
The five principles we set were:
- fairness,
- balance,
- choice,
- wow
- simplicity
They may appear to be different than ‘normal’ benefit principles such as competitive, compliant, consistent, etc., but that’s because as previously mentioned it was critical to have them align with our values and culture, and also be words/language which would work with our employees.
3) Stayed true to our principles
Our next step was to review our existing benefits against these benefit principles, conducting what we called our ‘health check-up’. We looked at each global benefit and assessed them against our principles, and looked at potential new benefits to improve the overall ‘health’ of our benefits package.
Throughout this process we stayed true to our principles, having them guide us through the often difficult decisions which need to be made when changing or adding benefit programmes.
One thing that helped with this is that we knew that I would need to deliver the results of the review at our all hands quarterly business update. So picturing me on stage explaining the changes made sure that everything we decided was transparent and could easily be explained to link back to our principles and objectives.
My advice to you is that even if you don’t have to get up on stage, pretend you have to, as it really does help/force you to make the right decisions.
4) Came up with 'amazing' changes
The final part of the process was pulling it all together, using an analogy of baking a cake, mixing all of the ingredients together to bake the perfect cake. I’m extremely proud of our ‘cake’ or our final global benefits suite, and the changes we made.
I believe what made our changes ‘amazing’ was not just the quality of our new benefits, but how they were clearly linked back to our strategic objectives and principles. Each and every one clearly aligned with how we answered the questions and the principles which we developed, making it the ‘right cake’ for our employees.
I hope you’ve found this helpful, and that you too end up with the perfect cake for your company.
Debra Corey is group reward director at Reward Gateway.
This article was provided by Reward Gateway.
In partnership with Reward Gateway
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