Technology is the foundation for meeting reward challenges in a complex world

The ongoing rise of automation and increasing digitisation of the workplace has sped up the greater use of technology in many HR and benefits departments over the past year. With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, HR teams became largely home based, along with half the UK’s employees. The ability to access employee benefits and reward via tech platforms, HR systems and apps became more vital than ever before. This urgent need to manage and select benefits from dispersed locations has intensified the need for good technology.

The enormous pandemic-driven shift in working has been coupled with an even greater demand for robust data and management information (MI). The increasing importance of demonstrating that reward practices and employee benefits offerings are aligned with organisational purpose and future strategy requires high quality data.

The pandemic also flagged up the diversity of all workforces and so greater personalisation and individualisation have become future priorities.

To meet these daunting challenges, employers need to be able to identify the MI they require, request the data they need, sort the relevant numbers from the irrelevant, and then manipulate and analyse them all into something that produces useful, actionable outcomes. Fortunately, the digital tools exist to make this task far more straightforward.

Our research demonstrates that emphasis on improving the analytical skills of those in the reward and benefits profession will receive much greater focus in the near future, if not already.

It also shows increased investment in tech tends to track increased spend in particular benefits areas. Looking back at REBA’s Technology Survey 2017/18, we see that over the past four years employee wellbeing tech has grown from just a third of employers offering it to more than two thirds offering it now.

Financial wellbeing (excluding pensions) tech has also benefitted from a greater investment by providers and employers: four years ago, two in 10 employers offered financial wellbeing tech, this has now shot up to more than four in 10.

Recognition platforms have also seen good growth, as our previous research predicted (even though we could not have forecast how a pandemic would spur this on).

Overall, areas where implementation of tech systems has been recent are also areas where employers have been more satisfied with the offerings. Just as in the consumer world, keeping up with the latest tech generally leads to a better experience.

However, I have a spoiler alert: no matter how good the tech, if employees don’t know about their benefits they do not engage with them. Two thirds of our respondents are still grappling with this conundrum.

REBA would like to say a special thank you to our strategic partner on this research, Buck. Their knowledge and insight on benefits technology were invaluable in developing the survey questions.

We would also like to thank the 149 employers who filled in our survey and were prepared to share their experiences for the benefit of the wider REBA community.

Download the findings from our Technology Research 2021: How reward and employee benefits systems and data are evolving.

The author is Debi O’Donovan, co-founder and director at REBA.