With five generations in the workplace for the first time, variety and flexibility is the key to an effective employee benefits proposition. We take a look at how you can personalise your company’s benefits offering to attract and retain.
What is personalisation and what does it mean for benefits?For years, the marketing industry has known that personalising products, offers and communications works better than simply giving everyone with the same information. Why? Because we’re increasingly time poor and only interested about what is relevant to us.
The same is true for employee benefits. Those that appeal to baby boomers won’t necessarily engage younger employees who may have a different focus. Place a huge emphasis on family-friendly benefits for example, and you’ll fail to deliver for those without children.
So what’s the answer? Understanding your employees’ needs is always a good starting point. As is using the data you hold on employees to segment communications. By taking time to find out what your employees want - rather than guessing or simply following the market data - will give you better insight. And help you develop a benefits package your staff really need.
Personalising in this way will enable your organisation to appeal to everyone across the employee lifecycle. And organisations who do this will gain significant competitive advantage as research from Willis Towers Watson shows:
- 74% of employers follow benchmarking data to set their benefits strategy
- Only 62% of employers take employee opinions into account
And when it comes to differentiating in a key area like health and wellbeing, only 6% of employers go above and beyond by actively differentiating their offering from other organisations.
One recent survey found that a pick-and-choose benefits package would be appealing to 94% of respondents, particularly for younger generations. And Towers Watson found that if employees are offered benefit choice more than double the number of employees value their benefits.
So how can you achieve personalised benefit provision without offering everything to everyone and breaking the bank?
