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28 Nov 2016
by Maggie Williams

REBA Innovation Day: 5 secrets of reward and benefits technology success

Technology is underpinning reward and benefits strategy, from fully featured flexible benefits platforms, to mobile apps to help employees track their wellbeing. Getting the scope and implementation right can be the difference between taking your reward offering to the next level, and an expensive mistake.

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At REBA’s Innovation Day on 22 November, five reward experts shared their secrets of technology success: 

1) Build a good relationship with your suppliers

"We agreed why we were making changes with our providers and what success would look like," said Ken Lawrie, head of reward at EasyJet. The airline recently updated its pension system to better support the freedom and choice changes.

"Test provider claims," added Jamie King, director of global reward at Xexec. He advised ensuring that systems really can integrate as claimed, and to avoid falling into the trap of writing service level agreements "that don’t work, or are carried over from an earlier project."

2) Make sure all stakeholders are involved

When Bloomberg introduced WorkDay across 72 countries, with different benefits on offer in each, Caroline Adam, head of benefits EMEA at Bloomberg saw the importance of good collaboration. "Identify the stakeholders and get them in place early. You need to validate that what you put in place will work," she said.

3) Match employees’ expectations

"People use mobiles and other devices with easy access outside work – and then are faced with clunky systems at work. We wanted something employees would want to use," explained Fiona Buchanan, executive vice president of HR at Causeway Technologies.

Causeway found that its great benefits offering was being hampered by disparate, difficult to use systems, so the company decided to put a new reward platform in place.

4) Keep it simple

Nadeen MacLean, UCI reward manager- shared services, Computershare, saw the advantages of simplicity during the development of her company’s total reward hub. "Avoid overcomplicating things," she advised. "The more variables you put on the platform, the more complicated it will be to administer."

5) Communicate

It may be obvious, but it really is essential. "Communications are key," said MacLean. "Ultimately you need engagement and that will feed into ROI," she said.

"As our system developed we communicated it in lots of different ways, such as videos and FAQs," said EasyJet's Lawrie. That helped stakeholders and users alike to understand the new system.

Reba's Innovation Day was held last week on 22 November. To download slides from the event click here.

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