Employee Benefits Live 2024: Sharing knowledge, ideas and budget plans are key to a successful benefits review, said Janet Mckenzie, group head of reward at Merlin Entertainments.
Addressing delegates at the closing keynote on day one of the conference in a session titled Unknotting your global benefits tangle, Mckenzie discussed the key learnings she garnered when conducting a global benefits review for Merlin.
Mckenzie explained how a priority for the review was to form a clear starting point of what she wanted to achieve. For Merlin, this was to create a minimum standard of benefits for its 26,000 employees in 23 countries around the world.
With a broad employee base with job roles that include hair inserter at Madam Tussauds and Lego model builders at Legoland, the benefits package needed to be attractive to attract and retain employees.
Mckenzie stated that a key factor in the review was to be clear about what she was doing and why, and share that with stakeholders to ensure buy-in from the top.
“We want employees to feel that they belong, and are treated consistently. They understand that benefits differ between countries and job levels but they want to be treated fairly,” Mckenzie said.
Merlin has made a few changes to its benefits since the review: it has changed its annual bonus scheme as it was failing motivating and engaging its junior-level employees who worked in the attractions.
The new bonus, Elevate the guest experience bonus, linked employees with its strategy to improve the net promoter score (NPS) for Merlin. A simple part of this that customers asked for was someone to say hello to them when they arrived, and goodbye when they left. Merlin focused its employees on improving the NPS. Since the introduction of the bonus, the NPS for 2024 is already tracking ahead.
It has introduced a new scheme that gives each Merlin employee six annual season tickets for their family and friends. It has also relaunched its Superstars recognition programme and created a People’s Choice award.
It created total reward statements to further inform and engage employees with their benefits and drive appreciation of benefits. The statements can be adapted by each country to keep a consistent thread.
With such a broad global reach, Mckenzie and her small central team made use of people teams in all the other countries that Merlin operates in to ensure that the employer is offering benefits that employees want and value.
“Leverage the power of the hive mind,” said Mckenzie. “There are a lot of people who want to get involved and will come up with ideas that you’d never have thought of on your own. Always build a team around you; you will get a better, richer outcome than anything you could have achieved on your own.”
