What are your employees saying about your employee benefits?
The answer to this question might be different for different organisations.
Here, we’ll attempt to address the common problems employees typically have with their benefits to help you mitigate against them or solve them moving forward.
Sometimes, it’s a simple fix and a case of a simple tweak. In other cases it may require a review of your benefits offering.
Either way we’ll guide you through in this article to help you get the best from your benefits provision and suitably reward your team.
Making benefits remotely accessible and available on-demand
Flexibility has been the word of recent times. With employee benefits, it’s important to enable employees to wrap their benefits experience around their work-life balance.
Employees need to be able to access their employee benefits and resources 24/7, wherever and whenever they want to suit them and fit around their busy lives.
Benefits that are great for this include the 24/7 online GP, Employee Assistance Programme and any health and wellbeing or financial wellbeing learning libraries.
Housing everything on a dedicated employee benefits platform is key.
Employees now rightly expect their benefits to be accessible 24/7 on any device and their queries answered in seconds.
An employee benefits platform can not only house and make available all your benefits on any device at any time, it can also be used to house information relating to schemes and FAQ’s to give employees the answers they need.
Ensuring benefits are appropriate in current climate
With the instability we’ve experienced in recent years, be it policitical, economic or even with our health, it’s important to regularly review your benefits and communication to ensure they’re sensitive, appropriate and really supporting your employees.
Are your employee discounts appropriate in supporting employees with the cost of living? Are you overly promoting expensive benefits to lower salaried employees?
It’s also incredibly important to be regularly surveying and talking to staff at this current time.
Their sentiment towards your organisation and how you’ve handled the challenges employees are facing and are likely to face in the coming months and years may dictate how you communicate benefits and which benefits you introduce.
Any other initiatives you introduce to support employees, for example with the cost of living, must align with how you communicate employee benefits to ensure employees get a consistent message and most importantly the support they need.
Providing appropriate benefits to meet individual needs
Employees quite rightly expect a more personlised experience with their employee benefits.
The needs of employees have become more dispersed in recent years, so providing benefits that meet all these needs has become even more of a challenge.
While it is a challenge, its important to get right.
Flexible benefits technology can help your business deliver the right benefits to the right people, allowing employees to essentially tailor their employee benefits according to their needs.
An employee benefits provider can help with this and can advise on the best benefits to include in your flexible benefits plan.
Providing enough benefits options
This leads us on to providing enough benefits options for your employees.
Often this is a factor employees highlight when talking about how their benefits could be improved.
At caboodle, this is why we provide the widest range of employee benefits to our clients you’ll find anywhere, so organisations have a whole range of options of benefits to offer their employees.
Providing a select few benefits, however popular they may be, limits the potential of your employee benefits offering.
In a competitive job market, providing a wide range of employee benefits options could be crucial in attracting and retaining top talent.
Ensuring benefits are properly communicated
We always maintain if you’re providing a strong benefits package it’s important everyone knows about it.
Using the right channels for your benefits communication is key.
For example, physical marketing like leaflets are great for employees that aren’t desk-based, while email or virtual workshops for those working remotely can be effective too.
There’s the different stages of the employee experience to consider too.
Effectively communicating the value of your employee benefits right from the first job advert to communicating with established employees is crucial.
Each organisation has it’s own unique challenges with employee benefits.
At caboodle, we help businesses find the right benefits solution for them and we never recommend something that isn’t right for your business.
For more information on what we do and how we can help your business with employee benefits, head over to our website and browse our employee benefits solutions.