Santander plans to use its benefits communications to increase take up of its salary sacrifice car scheme.
Speaking in a session titled ’The evolving world of salary sacrifice cars - now and in the future’, at Employee Benefits Connect on 4 March, Elliot Rees-Davies, reward director at Santander, said that, since its launch in 2011, the car scheme’s popularity has increased.
“Take up over time has been fairly consistent and continues to build,” he said. ”Take up is just under 1.200 cars, and we want to get to around 2,500, which will be 15% of our workforce.”
Santander uses a range of communication methods to inform employees about the scheme, which is provided by Zenith, to ensure that staff are aware of the value of the benefit.
Rees-Davies said: “We have a benefits portal which gets about 5,000 visits a day, about 20% of our workforce. That gives a lot of details of the scheme. We haven’t used emails as much as we should so we plan to get one out at least once a month promoting benefits in general, and cars will be a main feature of that.”
Santander also runs benefits roadshows and ’Ride and Drive’ events, which give employees the opportunity to test drive a car.
Rees-Davies explained that the plan for the future is to continue to use communications to drive awareness of the scheme. “Having got the scheme in place and worked out any issues, it’s really about communicating it more and maximising the take up. We’re going to do more events, more Ride and Drives, and more roadshows,” he said.
