Trying to engage your employees with their employee benefits offering can be a challenge but has real positives for them in many aspects of daily life. High engagement also has its benefits for your company too!
In this article we’ll explore how you can improve benefits engagement amongst your employees using technology. Before we start, it’s important to clarify that we’ll be talking about engagement with employee benefits, not the concept of employee engagement as a whole. Employee benefits engagement can be measured by high uptake levels and evaluating employee satisfaction.
Research
Implementing new employee benefits can massively benefit employees in many ways. To know how to make the most of them, research is key.
As a start, knowing what your employees actually want is an important step. There are many options available so doing your research about what you’re looking for as early as possible can save you a lot of time looking through your options.
Two great ways to do this are employee forums and surveys. Having an in person forum helps management get a proper sense of what employees want and space to ask questions. Whilst surveys are a good tool to get answers to particular questions and give everyone an equal say on the matter.
After you have a confirmed list of areas that employees need supporting with, you need to research what types of employee benefits are available that provide the support and what suppliers are out there. For example, employees may ask for a benefit that offers emotional support from professionals but the addition of a healthy living library on your platform would also be useful to help them take care of their wellbeing. Most suppliers will have their benefits offerings easily accessible on their website so that you don’t have to do too much research or go too far down the sign up process before you find out whether they have what you need.
Once you’re all set up on your benefits platform, keeping up with your employees needs over time will improve the usage of your employee benefits because it won’t become obselete as their needs change.
Particularly when you get new employees and current ones leave, it’s important to reassess whether your employee benefits are still supporting your employees the best they can.
Centralised platform
Providing an extensive employee benefits proposition, whilst great, can come with a lot of extra work to keep it running at an optimum rate without using a purpose-built platform.
Having all of your benefits placed on one centralised platform makes life easier for you and your employees when accessing what you need. An easy to use platform improves the chances of employees engaging with and getting the most out of their benefits.
It also lessens the amount of work you have to do as an administrator because the tools you need can be integrated into your platform. Most benefits platforms are also flexible and can have new things added to it. Any schemes that may not currently have high engagement can be made easier to utilize and advertise to your employees to boost engagement.
Scheme Calculators
A key part of an employee benefits proposition are salary sacrifice schemes. They help make things easier to afford for employees because of the small monthly repayments, rather than repaying in one go.
If these types of schemes are included in the package offered to your employees, scheme calculators are available so that the employee can work out how much their monthly repayments will be.
It also means that they’ll save on National Insurance and Tax payments, the calculator can help them figure out how much they’ll save each month.
This is useful for you too as you can gage how much you’ll be saving overall on payments each month depending on how many employees are signed up to the scheme.
Scheme info + marketing
Even if you provide the best employee benefits possible, to keep a good level of uptake, your employees need to be aware of how their employee benefit schemes works.
Having a platform means you can add information about your benefits and how they work, making it easy to access and easy for you to signpost employees to the information that they need.
Platforms can also host any marketing material that is available about your schemes and benefits platform to easily give out to your employees. This marketing is designed to be used to get your employees interested in the schemes available to them.
It also means that you can keep them up to date on where the scheme is if it’s not one that runs in set scheme windows rather than staying open year round.
App + mobile optimisation
Innovation is helping make many things in life easier. The introduction of apps has helped to make websites and documents more portable for when your employees are on the go.
It's important for benefits to be flexible and accessible on the go, having an app that your employees can just quickly log into instore and get access to the scheme makes it’s optimization opportunities much higher. For example, if your employees have instant discounts as part of their benefits, being able to access their discounts before going out or during their shop can be a real benefit.
With an app, employees can also get a summary of how much they’ve save with their discounts! We've recently launched our new Salary Extras app for our employee instant discounts scheme, allowing employees to access their discounts when they need or want to use them.
Click here for the full story on the launch of the brand-new Salary Extras app.
Accessibility features
For employees with certain disabilities, using technology can be easier than using paperwork.
People that are partially sighted or blind can use screen readers or voice command them in scrolling the web or apps on their device, whilst those deaf can use subtitles or transcripts to gain the information in any videos.
Looking at the accessibility features you can include on your platform, or speaking to employees about the tools they already have access to, not only gives your employees an easier experience of the platform but it helps them to utilize the benefits available to them, with no setbacks due to access.
We hope this article has helped provide you with information as to how you can use technology to improve engagement with your employee benefits.
Get in touch with us if you’re interested in finding out more about how to make the most of your benefits!