Steve Moore: Renewing flexible benefits
We have a bit of a dilemma this year as our flex offering is quite mature now. We have a whole raft of benefits that cover wellbeing, wealth, security and leisure – about 20 in total. So where do we go next?
Buying extra days’ holiday
One of the key people issues we face in our business is that some feel they are not attaining a sensible work/home balance – I know for a fact that we are no different from many other organisations in this sense. So, it makes sense to focus our efforts here. Purchasing additional holiday is a very popular benefit in our firm – almost two thirds of our people already take it up. From the opinions we’ve gathered, increasing the amount we can purchase is likely to go down well.
Focusing on wellbeing
Having more time off to do the things we like is nice – but often work is still there, untouched when we get back and we end up working twice as hard either side of our break to compensate. So, I’d also like to do more this year on wellbeing education – to help people understand the pressure points they might be facing either physically, emotionally or financially. We plan to introduce a diagnostic tool that will allow us all to do that and which also rolls up to provide an anonymous company-wide report on the collective key risk factors in our business.
Understanding retirement income
The last thing we are looking to do is to make some enhancements to our Guided Outcomes tool, which allows all of our pension plan members to understand what their target retirement income should be and take steps to ensure they achieve this. Focusing on financial wellbeing is just as important as the physical and mental side of wellbeing in my view.
Like all reward offerings, the proof of success will be in the take-up rate, so I wait with interest to see our stats in June.
Steve Moore is head of HR at Hymans Robertson
In partnership with Hymans Robertson
We're one of the longest established independent consulting and actuarial firms in the UK
