We all want our work to be easier and less time consuming, right? Managing employee benefits can be one hell of a task, particularly if you’re offering loads of benefits to loads of employees. Even If you’re just running a handful of benefits, if they’re popular or require a lot of attention, managing them can be a nightmare.
Aside from freeing up more time and helping make your life a little less stressful, you’ll find that benefits that are easier to manage will likely be more effective. We’ll get more into that.
So, how can we do it. Well, the best place to start is to do what most companies do.
Use an employee benefits platform
You might already have one of these, but know its strengths and how to use it to its full potential is a different question.
Using a platform gives you a ton of advantages.
It will allow you to host all your benefits in one place, not only making it easy to manage for you but making it easy to access for your employees. Whether you provide all your employee benefits yourself or you use different providers, you’ll be able to host and manage them all from one platform.
You’ll also have more streamlined administration, as most benefits platforms allow you to monitor scheme take up, manage application approvals and download promotional material, all from the platform. This is particularly useful for things like the Holiday Trading scheme. If you’re not familiar with Holiday Trading, it’s a scheme that allows employees to buy extra annual leave from their employers. Most companies manage applications for this scheme themselves. With a platform, you’ll be able to manage and approve applications, monitor how many people apply and have bought extra leave through the scheme, and download promotional material all in one place.
With all your benefits in one place, you’ll also be able to get all your data in one place. Having a platform that hosts all your benefits makes it easier to monitor your analytics, meaning you’ll get a more streamlined overview of how people interact with your schemes. Not only will the streamline your data but it will also allow you to get more of it. If you’ve got a scheme where employees need to go to the scheme provider’s site to access it, you won’t necessarily see how many employees have gone onto their site, unless you ask the provider for the data. However, if you advertise the benefit on your platform, and employees go from your platform to the scheme provider’s site, you’ll be able to see how many employees have gone to that site. Of course, employees can still access the scheme providers site directly, but you’ll still get more data than you otherwise would.
So, how does this make managing benefits easier? Firstly, it makes it easier to get data on how your employees use your benefits. This makes it a lot easier to increase engagement as you’ll be able to see what benefits are popular and how they are interacted with.
For example, say your employees need to go through your platform to access one of your schemes. If lots of employees view the scheme page but not many click through to the provider’s site or take up the scheme, it could indicate that the copy on the scheme page isn’t compelling or informative enough. Thus, you can improve your communications.
With the time you save by having an employee benefits platform, you’ll be able to focus more on driving engagement and promoting your benefits. Many benefits platform providers offer a bespoke platform and bespoke communications as well as marketing material, making managing benefits even easier.