Engaging a deskless workforce with benefits
Around 2.8 million people work in retail, making up roughly 10% of all UK jobs and cementing its position as the country's largest private-sector employer. Most of these are deskless, working on the shop floor, stockroom or on the move.
A robust benefits package is all well and good but if the workforce is unsure about what's on offer and, worse still, are blocked from accessing it due to their shift patterns, location or even their digital literacy, those perks soon become a cost centre, not an engagement tool.
Why your frontline doesn't see what you offer
A large share of the retail workforce doesn't have an email or may only share a generic mailbox that's rarely checked, so the message that reaches salaried staff never makes it to the till or loading bay. Using a personal email doesn't necessarily help either. The numbers that tell you it's working can't be trusted.
Since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in 2021, a growing share of opens are logged automatically by the device rather than by a person reading, which inflates open rates. Essentially, you can send to an inbox that exists and still have no reliable idea whether anyone saw it.
Then there's the working day itself. Shift patterns, no natural downtime and no desk moment to browse a portal means there's nowhere for benefits to surface in the flow of the day.
An app won't close the gap
The benefits app can appear as a panacea to the engagement issue - after all, almost everyone owns a smartphone.
Digital confidence can be critical here; downloading an app, trusting it with bank or personal details, remembering another login and feeling sure enough to navigate a benefits portal can be barriers for many employees. In fact, as Ofcom research points over half of working-age adults, including those aged 18 to 24, can’t complete all the digital tasks considered essential for work.
Turnover keeps resetting the clock
Retail has one of the highest staff turnover rates of any UK sector, with more than half of employees leaving within a year, which means engagement is never finished: every launch starts to fade the moment the next intake arrives. So, what will help increase engagement?
Keeping people coming back to access their benefits is a question of habit and most programmes stall because they lean on a single channel and use it too rarely to help staff build that habit. What works best is a multi-channel approach, so no one is missed.
For some, posters are where it’s at. Flagging the deals, the access to the EAP, a mental health telephone number, whatever you want to highlight, posters and break-room materials reach staff who have no work email. Placement and content are what turn a poster into an action, so put it in the cafeteria, on the staff noticeboard or by the lockers, lead with one clear benefit, and add a QR code to further reduce friction.
Comms with the company ‘voice’
Co-branded materials read as the employer's own rather than an anonymous third party, which helps immeasurably for a workforce that's wary of signing up to anything unfamiliar.
Building a benefits campaign around useful, timely content is going to land much better than official HR broadcasts where clicks and redemptions are the yardstick.
Comms can be targeted by how people are using them but instead of sending the same thing to everyone and hoping for the best, you can reach the staff who've never activated their account, or who signed up and drifted off, with a message aimed squarely at them.
Give them a reason to come back
Gamification remains a popular driver for engagement so adding a fun element, competition or incentive which costs the employer nothing provides a reason for employees to log back in. This can help build that routine which is missing when HR applies the ‘launch it and leave it’ approach.
With all the will in the world, if someone doesn’t know how to physically navigate a portal to access their benefits, they aren’t going to use it. People learn differently, and the ability to provide one-to-one onboarding, where possible, can help kinaesthetic, auditory and visual learners understand how to access and use their benefits. This turns ‘it’s on the portal’ to ‘someone showed me’.
Why small changes add up
Each of these lift engagement by a little, and across a larger workforce, a few points of extra engagement is a large return on spend you've already committed, meaning that the barrier to getting there is usually capacity, not budget. Designing the materials, writing emails worth opening, keeping the content fresh and timing the on-site visits is the real, continuous work.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, My Group
We work with UK employers to bring these three things together, offering practical benefits employees use, human support that reaches the people who need it, and a measurable difference to how your people feel about work.
