To personalise benefits, start with the individual
If you asked reward professionals what their objectives or activity were surrounding their benefits programme, invariably the topics of personalisation and choice would be close to the top of most people’s lists.
It certainly marries well to the thematic trends at a strategic HR level around culture, employee experience and DEI agendas, and there are no doubts that different employee demographics have different drivers and needs.
From an employee benefits perspective, personalisation is primarily about adding choice – recognising the different needs of employees and enabling them to select benefits that fit with their goals and lifestyle. For the past 20 years or so, this had been achieved mainly through flexible benefits, a trend set to continue.
Benefits have evolved
With the focus on employee wellbeing coming to the fore in recent years, however, benefits have needed to respond and evolve. This has meant looking beyond choice or the range of benefits employees can select.
It has meant providing additional services and initiatives (not benefits, in the strictest sense) that allow employees to get the most from what is on offer, including education, guidance and even advice around not just finances, but health and wellbeing.
It is this combination of a broader set of benefits, services and initiatives that together make up a true approach to personalisation.
Thinking about the individual
This is where starting with the individual is key. To deliver benefits and associated initiatives to hundreds or even thousands of employees, it’s important to understand the needs of each individual. You can then start to build a model or framework for how to scale that up to deliver to your full population.
The difference between thinking of the individual first (rather than all your employees as a cohort) is that how you deliver your offer to employees is likely to end up looking quite different. For example, it could change how you look at the use of technology versus people-led services.
In terms of building that framework, there are established models and tools you can consider too, whether it’s the four pillars of wellbeing – financial, mental, physical or social – or, within each of those pillars, the breakdown of needs someone is likely to have.
For example, understanding individual employee financial wellbeing needs from day-to-day money management through to asset accumulation and preservation could help shape the combination of products and service you make available to employees and how you deliver them.
Helping employees understand their needs
Having a set of rules or parameters you could apply to any given employee, helping them understand their needs, is the key if you want to then help them solve those problems, but also to be able to help your employees solve different problems in a scalable way.
Once you have that framework in place, you need to think about how you deliver to employees, to help them make sense of the products and services you have on offer and how they are solving (at least some of) their needs.
Constantly using that framework in a visible way is key to success, especially as each employee’s needs are likely to change over time and, as you’ve helped them to solve one problem, the next one is likely to arise.
Take the example of an employee trying to manage debt vs another employee trying to save for retirement – when an employee’s debt is under control (because you’ve given them the tools) so their attention should turn to how they use money previously allocated to paring down debt, to save for a better future.
In partnership with Howden Employee Benefits
Howden provides insurance broking, risk management and claims consulting services, globally. We work with clients of all sizes to provide dedicated employee benefits & wellbeing consultancy.
