Law firm D Young ran focus groups last year before launching a flexible benefits plan to find out what perks its staff wanted. The firm’s 150 staff includes partners, as well as fee-earning staff, support staff and managers.
The focus groups, run by Thomsons Online Benefits, were held first with partners, and then with the rest of the company’s employees. Jennifer Mead, HR manager at D Young, says: “We felt that by engaging a third party to run those focus groups, we might get information that employees may not be comfortable to say in front of the HR team.”
Mead says that the most important lesson from the profiling exercise was that employees were engaged from the earliest focus groups right through to the launch of the flex scheme. “We were able to do that because our provider did both the focus groups and the subsequent communications to staff when the scheme was introduced,” she adds.
Following the flex scheme’s launch in June, D Young is to carry out an online employee survey to identify changes for next year’s enrolment period. Mead says: “We want to get employees’ thoughts on what we have currently done and find out whether they have any other requests we can consider."
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