Ketan Patel of Haleon on the importance of communicating the value of employee benefits
You can produce an absolutely stellar benefits strategy, but if your workforce doesn’t know about it or understand how to use it to best effect, have you really succeeded?
At REBA’s recent webinar, Delivering great benefits design from strategy to tactics, supported by Howden Employee Benefits & Wellbeing, Ketan Patel, head of APAC and EMEA benefits at consumer health company Haleon, shared his thoughts on effectively communicating the value of benefits to employees.
Benefits 101
In addition to creating your benefits package, you need to consider how you will communicate those benefits in order to help employees truly understand the value of them.
“This might be understanding what type of cover an income protection plan offers an employee, or helping people to understand how a dental or a healthcare scheme works,” said Patel. “We also looked at removing barriers around the eligibilities of benefits to make them fairer.
“We took away grade-based eligibilities, when it comes to things like healthcare, to ensure that everyone had funded healthcare for their family, regardless of their grade or length of service.”
He went on to explain how important it was to the company philosophy to make everyday healthcare more accessible to employees. And also how crucial it is to maintain communication with your workforce, so that they fully understand the benefits on offer, and what it takes to create the package.
Carte blanche on benefits?
Should we perhaps just give employees whatever benefits they want? Patel doesn’t think so.
“Research has shown us in the past that, where employees feel there’s a want for a particular benefit, you normally actually find that the take-up isn’t the strongest,” he explained. “A lot of it is down to helping employees understand what the benefits are – we can do that as we’re closer to the subject matter.
“It’s trying to understand what employees perceive to be a good benefits package, and also helping them understand why we as a business or an employer offer benefits in a particular way.”
Why we do what we do
Patel has noticed that, from an employee’s perspective, it doesn’t always make sense as to why things are done in a particular way.
“What I've found works really well, is working with employee reps and champions within different parts of the business,” he concludes. “They tend to be a voice of the people, because they’re not in the benefits or HR space, and working with them can help us to communicate why we offer certain benefits in a particular way.”
Quality communication
Looking for ways to ensure you’re getting the message across to your employees? Here are some top tips from our webinar panellists:
- Seek insight and feedback from peer groups, employee reps and champions
- Run benefits fairs
- Communicate through webinars, seminars and workshops
- Send email blasts about specific topics
- Collate feedback through surveys and polls
- Publish company blogs and newsletters about benefits and related topics/issues
- Keep your intranet and benefits apps up to date
- Publish benefits information on paper and on screens within the workplace.
