Employee Benefits Live 2024: As wellbeing is central to an employer’s foundations, it is critical to keep evaluating and developing initiatives, as highlighted during the first day of Employee Benefits Live 2024 on 8 October.
This was just one of the points discussed by Hayley Manning, HR business partner at Cyberfort Group, Marta Thomas (pictured), people and culture director at SIXT, and Alex Henley, wellbeing consultant at Co-op, during in a session titled ‘How does pay and reward foster holistic wellbeing?’
The session explored how reward and benefits can be used as a catalyst to increase job satisfaction, improve retention and boost productivity, while also examining the role of reward and benefits in employees’ physical, financial, mental and emotional health.
The three speakers discussed how gleaning regular feedback from employees, through surveys, focus groups and roadshows, can allow employers to get the balance right with wellbeing and offer safety nets to ensure resilience is maintained.
“Organisational and leadership culture is key to ensuring wellbeing is in place,” said Sixt’s Thomas. “Every employee needs to hear the same message, so they should vary their communication style based on workers’ roles and locations.”
Co-op’s Henley added that the more employers involve their staff in designing wellbeing benefits, the more effective they can be, as they can base them on what employees say they want and need.
He said: “Financial resilience is key, it cannot be left behind as then employees will get left behind. It’s also important to ensure support is communicated well to avoid overwhelming people. It’s best to use one communication channel and offer staff short and sharp pieces of information.”
Thomas stated that it is important to cater to each age demographic in terms of what they need and preferred communication methods, while Cyberfort’s Manning added that this can ensure employees feel valued, cared about and invested in.
“Management also need to pass the message down regarding what is good for wellbeing and what the best solution to offer to address this would be,” she said.
They finished by recommending that it does not always help to offer what everyone else is doing in terms of benefits, and that not everything will work in the same way each year, so it is important to regularly assess and evaluate benefits.
