×
First-time login tip: If you're a REBA Member, you'll need to reset your password the first time you login.
15 Oct 2015
by Andy Philpott

Improve your ROI employee benefits – five things you can do today

In the week that UK employment moved to the highest rate since 2008 and the countdown towards the end of the year begins, now is a good moment to think about how we can help our organisations get ahead in the battle to attract and retain the people we need to help to succeed in 2016.

E228-1444896899_Andy_Philpott_Sales_%26_Marketing_Director_Print.jpg

In the week that UK employment moved to the highest rate since 2008 and the countdown towards the end of the year begins, now is a good moment to think about how we can help our organisations get ahead in the battle to attract and retain the people we need to help to succeed in 2016.

There is no doubt that employee benefits remains a critical tool at our disposal in helping us stand out as an attractive employer and in supporting employees in areas which make a real difference to their lives. The problem is that many organisations suffer from a kind of ‘benefits blindness’ where are employees are unaware or simply forget what is on offer undermines the investment they make.

So as we consider our plans for the coming year, maximising the return on investment in employee benefits should be the forefront of our minds. What can organisations practically do to improve benefits engagement? I see five areas of best practice form the clients we work with at Edenred.

  • Listening to staff – It is common for HR teams and employee benefits specialists to bemoan the way employees ignore our efforts to communicate the employee benefits proposition. The employers I see who have overcome this problem are the ones who have stopped ‘selling’ their position and started listening to what employees want. These organisations take time to understand the changing priorities, common needs and different interest of their employees so they can refine what how they approach benefits communication.
  • More creative benefits propositions – Building on the insight gained from a listening to employees a second area where employees can increase the effectiveness of employee benefits is by going beyond offering benefits products to offering a more rounded proposition for different groups of employees. Here for example, a company which relies on working parents could introduce flexible working hours alongside childcare vouchers to help reduce the cost of childcare. Companies with high numbers of younger workers can rethink their induction to include financial education so they make the most of the benefits on offer and get into the right spending and saving habits from early on in their career. In short, the different generations in our workforce present a huge opportunity for us to leverage employee benefits to attract, motivate and engage our people.
  • Campaigns driving communication– Many people I speak to now recognise that the mere fact of employing someone doesn’t make it more likely for them to pay attention to what you have to stay. In fact, given the torrent of internal communication, employee benefits and HR teams arguably have to work harder than any other part of the organisation to get themselves heard. Knowing the different employee groups in your organisation will help you tailor what you say so it is more relevant and better targeted. But the biggest benefits come from thinking like marketers, taking a campaign based approach to communications, using creativity, a range of channels and messages which relate to individual needs rather than pushing products. Social channels such as Yammer are critical to this and if you aren’t using internal social platforms, it is time to think about doing it now.
  • The technology upgrade – For many organisations, declining or low levels of benefits engagement has a simple cause: the inability for employees to access and manage their benefits in a straightforward way. Online benefits administration which is optimised for mobiles and tablets is now an expectation which employees bring in from their consumer lives. With plenty of product innovation in this area from benefits providers, there is no reason why any organisation should be meeting that expectation.
  • Stop doing the bad stuff – The final area organisations should consider is the benefits investments which take up lots of time and aren’t valued by employees. You’ll find this out by talking to them and if you stop doing the stuff that employees don’t value you can unlock investment for the things they really do want.

One final point to make is to ensure that employee benefits are aligned to an employee value proposition which extends to all the reward, incentives and recognition you give as an employer.

Andy Philpott is sales and marketing director of Edenred UK. You can find more blogs and insight on our e.hub at www.edenred.co.uk. You can follow Andy on twitter @Andy_philpott

This article was provided by Edenred UK.

Related topics

In partnership with Edenred

We help you build stronger connections with your employees to drive higher engagement&performance.

Contact us today