Four tips to make sure your new benefits offering doesn’t fall short
We all want our new benefit offerings to be a success and “hit the mark”. But what can we do to make sure we hit the target and “score” for our company? For a moment, let’s pretend we’re a keen archer, able to hit the target each and every time, scoring and winning the competition. Here are four tips to help you to get ready, aim and fire, making sure that the next time you put in place a new benefit, it doesn’t fall short of the target, wasting time and money for you and your company.
1. Ready – develop a plan. My first tip is an obvious one, but one that’s often overlooked, and it’s about planning and getting yourself “ready”. We often spend so much time selecting and implementing the benefit that we either forget about or don’t leave enough time to plan for the introduction of it.
If you think about planning from an archer’s perspective, you’ll see that if you don’t do this, if you just shoot the arrow, you have no chance of ever hitting the target. So take the time upfront to create a detailed plan, and map out everything that needs to be done such as what you’ll do, when, and who’ll be carrying out the actions.
2. Ready – practice makes perfect. The other key to getting ready is practice and assessing the impact. Just like an archer, who would never go to a competition without practicing first, the same holds true for your benefits launch.
You need take a few practice ‘runs’ either by testing it on a smaller population or discussing it with a focus group, to make sure that what you’re planning will work and that it’s making the impact that you require. By doing this you’ll be able to prevent any problems that may occur and/or make any necessary adjustments to ensure your benefit has the biggest impact possible. And don’t forget to also assess the impact at the end of your launch, so that you can determine if anything further needs to be done and take into account any lessons for your next launch.
3. Aim – think of alignment. When shooting arrows at a target you need to think about how you’ll aim them and how they’ll all work together to get you the highest score. The same is true with your benefits, aiming to get them to all work together to get the best ‘score’ from your employees. A key element of this is timing, so when and how you’ll introduce the benefit. Take this into consideration as you decide when and how to launch your new benefit.
Many years ago I made a mistake with this, introducing a new benefit at the same time as removing another. My mistake wasn’t what I did, for the benefit changes made sense, but it was how I did it and the lack of alignment. I failed to explain why the changes were being made and how they were aligned, and the result was that the new benefit ended up having a negative connotation. The good news is that I learned from this, and have never made this mistake again.
4. Fire – create some ‘wow’. In archery the key to success is speed and accuracy, but in the benefits world it’s more about the ‘wow’. What I mean by this is creating something so fantastic to launch your new benefit offering that your employees wouldn’t dream of missing it.
One of my favourite examples of this was when we launched our wellbeing benefit at my company, using a teaser campaign to create excitement. Each day a different door opened on our engagement hub, telling employees a little more about the benefit, so that by the final day everyone was so excited that they just had to engage with the new benefit.
So next time you launch a new benefit offering, think ready, aim and fire, and I’m sure you’ll succeed, hit the target, and score with your employees.
The author is Debra Corey, group reward director at Reward Gateway.
This article was provided by Reward Gateway.
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