How to plan a long-term benefits strategy that embraces personalisation
For starters, personalisation can help drive better engagement and understanding of the benefits and pension you offer as part of the total reward offering. Employees feel a greater sense of belonging and loyalty to a company if the benefits offered reflect their individual lifestyle needs.
Getting personal
No two employees are the same, and at different stages of their careers and personal lives they are, unsurprisingly, looking for different things when it comes to their benefits. This may range from those at the early stages of their career wanting to have access to social events within the workplace, as well as better savings options to help them pay off debt or save to get on the property ladder. Whereas those at later stages in their career or perhaps those who are starting family life, may focus on things like more days of annual leave or more options for their health and overall wellbeing.
As a company, when you decide that you want to make your long-term benefits strategy more personal, one key first step is to engage with your employees and get to the bottom of what they understand about what you offer and what they really want.
Reviewing your current offering
First, it’s important to review your existing benefits and pensions offering, mapping out what you can realistically change by when, taking into account system limitations, budgets and contractual offerings. Once a review has been conducted, with some ideas and options generated around what you can realistically change, you need to engage with your employees, which can be done in a number of ways:
- For smaller companies, drop-in session or focus groups could be organised where employees should feel free to discuss what they like about their current benefits package and what they would like to see more of.
- Larger companies may be wise to consider conducting an online poll where employees are able to rank their priorities for the new, improved benefits strategy with the option to suggest anything they feel has been left out.
- Those companies who already have their benefits offering via an online platform could set up online feedback forums on the same platform.
After reviewing feedback from your employees, it’s time to plan how you will put this into action.
Making a long-term plan
Your long-term strategy could take a variety of forms but one important aspect, regardless of the shape that your strategy takes, is ensuring it is linked to your company’s wider strategic objectives and outcomes, and is supported by clear communication with your employees throughout. Always ask yourself what the touch points are with your employees for each aspect of the offering. Having a robust communications strategy to support the implementation of your new benefits strategy will help to engage employees with your new offering and lead to an overall, more successful outcome.
How you implement your long-term strategy will of course also depend on your company’s resources and technology. You may wish to implement new personalised aspects of your benefits offering all at once or in a more phased approach –whatever method you use it should fit in with your employees’ life and career cycles and changes to make things really personalised. Once your strategy is in place, it is key to review it regularly so that it has long-term success and continues to stay relevant for your employees.
The message is clear, greater personalisation of employee benefits offerings will lead to happier employees that feel valued and will consequently improve employee retention rates – something important to every company and something that even the best companies can do more work on. Communicating your strategy well to employees and reviewing it regularly is vital and will not only engage your employees but also ensure successful implementation in the long-term.
The author is Dipa Mistry Kandola, head of flexible benefit services at LCP.
This article was provided by LCP.
