Understanding the make-up of your employees and their professional and personal goals can only be the right thing to do, can’t it?
As I see it, getting to know employees shouldn’t be viewed as paternalistic, but as a genuine desire to build a long-standing and sustainable culture of trust, whereby staff feel valued and, in turn, exhibit stronger allegiance to their employer and co-workers.
Extending our understanding of employees beyond the workplace, and having an interest in their personal goals, can help shape and deliver a much stronger employee value proposition, where the benefits we choose to offer them are both relevant and desired by employees, making the very best use of benefit professionals’ time, effort and expense.
In our personal lives as consumers, it is commonplace for the providers we choose to obtain services or make purchases from to have a clear picture of our personal preferences and needs. But, as employers, do we not require our employees to understand and individually cater for our external customers? Why as benefits professionals would we not want to extend the same thinking to our employees?
But what does that mean for said professionals? Is the answer to be found in data and are we ready and have the right skill set to adopt and put into practice a more sophisticated approach to understand our employees better? Or will we just expend all our energy having to hunt and gather every piece of data we can find and become overwhelmed by the prospect?
The proverbial stick must be placed in the sand at some point if we are to be sincere in our approach to truly get to know our employees better and therefore when tasks seem just too big to handle. I find small steps can still get you to where you need to go and, in return, what will be delivered is a much richer, relevant and meaningful proposition for employees.
Nadeen Jackson-Barker is HR reward manager at Axa UK