How to avoid the disconnect between benefits communication and understanding
It’s all well and good having a fantastic employee benefits proposition if your people don’t know what’s on offer. You need to familiarise and educate them about it. More importantly, you need to engage them with it.
Reconnecting the disconnect
Before you charge into your new revolution of employee engagement, first you need to understand what employers consider what is good.
Zest's research has found that 45% of employees believe that their employee benefits package is inadequate.
This is surprising, when you consider 48% of businesses have confirmed that they have increased the investment in their benefits offering in the last 12 months.
With employee benefits a huge contributor towards talent attraction and retention, getting it right is vital to your overall proposition, and ultimately, successful employee engagement.
Four out of ten (42%) of those surveyed by Zest said that a good benefits package is the most important thing they look for in employment, with 67% of 18-34 year-olds admitting they would walk away from their current job if offered a better benefits package.
The first step towards defining a quality employee engagement proposition is to personalise your benefits package.
Six out of ten (62%) employees would happily use their benefits package more if it was tailored to their needs. Get that right, and engaging your employees will be easier than a Sunday morning.
Future of employee benefits and engagement is changing
Despite the disconnect, the future world of work, and more specifically employee benefits, looks highly promising.
Some good progress has been made when it comes to the employee benefits landscape, with employers better recognising the value of employee benefits, investing in their offering and aligning with their employees on future workplace initiatives.
While employers seem to be meeting general demands, the starkest disconnect surrounds levels of personalisation and communication employees are expecting – nine out of ten (87%) employees believe that information surrounding their benefits is clearly communicated, yet just half (50%) of employees know exactly what their employer offers.
But how can employers solve this, and revolutionise the way you engage with your people?
Employee benefits technology can equip employers with the right tools to adapt to the changing and individual demands within its workforce and deliver a personalised employee experience.
A quarter (24%) of HR leaders said managing benefits is a manual and tedious task, a fifth (18%) said they don’t currently have access to detailed data on take-up of specific benefits and a staggering 82% said employee benefits technology would make their job significantly easier.
By offering insights to understand how employees are using their benefits, employers can better understand how their needs can be best met, enjoy the flexibility of being able to adapt this offering accordingly, know how to directly improve their communications and employee engagement, and ensure that their benefits package is getting the best return on investment.
Focus on the way you communicate
Using this data to provide targeted communications with employees based on age, gender or team for example, can further promote benefit take-up which contributes to an improved overall employee proposition, making employees more likely to be engaged and stay with a company.
Your pay and benefits are only one part of your broader employee value proposition. You need a platform that also enables employees to understand your broader proposition, particularly those elements that are less transactional and build engagement and loyalty.
This is where you can stand out from the crowd and really develop your employee/employer relationship.
Focus on:
- Your people policies, wellbeing tools and guidance, community activities, clubs and activities, learning resources, social events etc.
- Ensuring your content regarding your employee proposition remains current and fresh.
This is an edited version of the original article which is available to read in full here.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Zest
Zest is the next generation platform that’s reinventing the world of employee benefits.
