Technology organisation Siemens promotes its benefits offering to potential and current employees as much as possible to ensure that they are aware of what is available to them, and how they can make any amendments to their package.
The package is promoted on both internal and external job adverts, and more details are given out during the interview process. The organisation also has a PDF flyer with details of the total reward package an individual can expect to receive at Siemens, which is given out during the recruitment process.
Siemens has a flexible benefits platform, provided by Thomsons Online Benefits, on which it has frequently-asked-question (FAQ) pages which are continually updated with any benefit changes. Siemens offers benefits through anytime enrolment as well as enrolment-only.
The pandemic has led Siemens to create an internal Covid crisis team, which sits as part of the HR leadership team. This includes focusing on attracting the right talent and making sure that the organisation is communicating effectively to its 13,000 UK employees.
Natasha Blakey, compensation and benefits professional at Siemens, explains: “[The reward team] has been working closely with [the crisis team] to understand the immediate issues and challenges the organisation faces with communication and employees being on furlough, for example.”
In the early days of the pandemic, Siemens worked with its financial education provider, Nudge, to send out notifications to furloughed employees and tailored communication for those that were either on full pay, 80% pay, and online or offline populations.
“Longer term, we’re incorporating Covid into our benefits stategy, so we’ve implemented a Covid hub into our flexible benefits platform which has resources for our employees,” says Blakey. “It's just about keeping in touch with what's going on and the updates from the government. We make sure that our FAQ pages are updated and keep it all in one place, because our Covid crisis team send out a regular employee update.
“We've also been reminding employees about our flexible benefits: what changes could be made if they want to make changes, what ones are anytime enrolment and what's enrolment-window period only, that kind of thing.”
