EXCLUSIVE: Birmingham City Council employees have made savings of £187,000 through the organisation’s online employee discounts scheme.
The programme, which was introduced in November 2011, is used by 8,300 of the council’s 48,000 employees.
Since its launch, employees have spent £3 million on purchases through the scheme.
Raffaela Goodby, head of organisational development, engagement and wellbeing at Birmingham City Council, said: “In the public sector we can’t give pay rises at the moment, so we [had] to look at other innovative ways to create a perceived increase in pay at no cost to the taxpayer.”
The scheme, which is provided by Asperity Employee Benefits and can be accessed through the My Birmingham Rewards portal, offers discounts at a range of national and local retailers.
The programme is linked to the organisation’s engagement strategy and aims to create value for council employees.
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Raffaela Goodby will be speaking about HR’s role in employee motivation and engagement at Employee Benefits Live on 26 September at Olympia, London.
£187,000 sounds great but…. that works out at just over £22.50 for each employee actually using the scheme or less than £4 per head of the total employee base. And that’s over nearly 2 years.
I think this story was supposed to make the scheme sound great, but the actual figures make for pretty poor reading when properly looked at.
I don’t know what the scheme costs the council (and by default us as tax payers) but I’d be asking some serious questions of Asperity as to why less than 20% of employees use the scheme and why those that do use it aren’t very active.
These schemes can be fantastic and save people hundreds or thousands of pounds every year. Something is clearly going wrong in Birmingham.
I am all for challenge Tim but your comment lacks insight into what is a very difficult market – I have done something very similar to the Birmingham roll out and its the hardest reward activity I have ever undertaken.
A council of this size will have a huge proportion of their workforce who are not online at work (school meal supervisors, lollipop people, dustmen, parks and gardens etc)- often more then 50% – this means their implementation is slower and takes much longer to educate and bed in. Local government departments of this size also contain a very high proportion of school staff – clearly your comments are no doubt based on having dealt with populations sitting in a few locations – for somewhere the size of BCC try hundreds of locations.
You also clearly haven’t considered the demographic – local government has a demographic which is your usual office based internet savvy population – think predominantly female and aged 45 plus and you might begin to see the true picture.
You also seem to have missed the fact that this will have been delivered by a small team who almost certainly did this not as their day job but alongside it – your comments are a betrayal of the hard work they will have put in.
I appreciate that you work for a rival of the provider in question here but its immature to come onto such a site and use an employers good news story to try and rubbish a rival to promote yourself. Integrity matters in business – you have shown none
Bless you Tim for your high-minded trolling of what should be regarded as a positive news story reflecting the hard-work of a small group of dedicated individuals at Birmingham City Council. As the saying goes, in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king and it’s not your fault that you are unaware of the broader underlying facts behind this story. There was no tax payer funding involved so the saving is a direct contribution to the workforce that might not otherwise have been made, nearly 200 Birmingham based businesses have been able to showcase offers and benefit from the Council’s strategy to support local enterprise and overall employee engagement has increased significantly. Furthermore, your two year calculation (20 full months of recorded data in actuality) belies the fact that roll-out was complex, has been phased to take account of local circumstances and only now is nearing completion. The annual spend and save run rates are expanding exponentially as expected once initial critical mass has been reached.
There are many difficult challenges in public sector right now and take-up is respectable as you will know when you compare with the level of sign-up versus most other benefits. And in the case of Birmingham City Council and any other client we service, we have a long-standing track record of delivering several multiples of employee savings for every pound the employer puts in, thereby providing the most efficient (non tax-relief assisted) way of leveraging scarce reward budget. Having reviewed your Rewards and Discounts oeuvre I would imagine you might have to invest more time asking yourself serious questions along the lines of Matthew 7:3 rather than others. In the meantime welcome to the marketplace and we look forward to watching you march towards your zenith rather than the nadir exhibited here.
The problem is no one knows about it. I’ve been a BCC employee for over 10 years now (no idea how long it has been going for) and have only found out about it. Could have saved a fortune, if only we were told about it. All it takes is an email to all staff. (I work in a school so this would be easy!)
Tim, I fail to see how you can have such a negative stance towards what is a great effort by the Birmingham team, and a great service to their employees, who are obviously engaging with this benefit and saving money. This should be celebrated by benefit and reward professionals.
To engage any employees in benefits is difficult, even more so in the tough economic environment in which we find ourselves and constant legislative change confusing and muddying the waters more and more.
In fact, in terms of ROI, engagement, and good old “Bang for Buck” you cannot find better than Discount schemes, especially when medical and risk benefit inflation is considered.
Although obviously at the tax payers expense, the council could always introduce a scheme that no one will use or value and that still sees price inflation running at over 12% per year.
Perhaps this is where one should spend the time wondering how this is allowed to happen. But then one should never bite the hand that feeds it.
So sad, Tim. I see from Linked-In you’re a Burton lad. Looks like you’ve gone for a “Gone for a Burton”.
Thanks for your comments everyone and for the understanding and appreciation of the hard work it took to get us to this point in Birmingham with such a challenging demographic.
Tim, in the article I clearly say that tax payers do not fund this scheme, not one penny of your Council Tax goes towards it.
You are of course entitled to your opinion but it does feel a bit uncomfortable that you use your Brummie status to be negative about a scheme when you work for an employee benefits company yourself who are a competitor. Makes me feel icky as it’s so unprofessional and well…a bit obvious really.
If you want to come and have a chat to some of the employees who are using MBR to understand their savings, how it has raised their morale, how employees are saving hundreds on their essential spending, how we have worked with trade unions, and how challenging the comms are, please feel free to pop in as you are only ten minutes away.
Alternatively I will see you at Employee Benefits in September and you can tell me how rubbish you think our scheme is over a cup of tea 🙂
Raffaela
I would like to reply to some of the responses to my initial comment which appear to have been taken as an attack on Asperity and/or Birmingham Council.
What I intended to do was open a debate and question the numbers in the article and understand if it is truly such a good news story. I did not mention my company, and as far as I was aware there was no way for others to see who that is nor did I suggest that anyone else is better placed than Asperity to offer a better scheme. I included my name as I believe that if you want to post something online you should be prepared to stand by what you say.
The Asperity scheme is very good, provides great offers and can allow employees to save hundreds of pounds each year when used effectively. I do not at any point say the scheme is rubbish, or that it is not a challenge to get right. Again, I am just trying to understand why the numbers are what they are, and your responses about phased roll outs, lack of online access et al goes some way to explain this.
I take offence to the trolling comment, that word has serious connotations in the modern world.
Finally I admit that I have not dealt with a scheme of this size and probably never will as that is not our intention, if you believe that a 20% take up and c£22 saving for active users after 20 months is a typical result then I accept that this is indeed good news.
I would take you up on your offer of a cup of tea Raffaela, but I’m sorry to say that I won’t be at the event this year.
I’ve just come across this article and felt that I needed to comment … I work for Birmingham City Council and have so far saved over £300! I think it’s a brilliant employee benefit, and the fact that it doesn’t cost me anything to join and I can save so much money on my everyday shopping is great, especially at a time when we aren’t receiving any pay increases!
If we ignore the fact that the original reply appears to have had ulterior motives, the fact remains that the numbers are not impressive the comments on here appear to be making excuses for the low take up. Isn’t it about time that we saw some articles explaining how hard these plans are to implement rather than the usual articles/adverts that purport them to be a simple, cheap easy fix for all employers that will be instantly used and appreciated by all?
All too often we are given the good side without being told of the difficulties of achieving them.
I’m an employee of Birmingham City Council and I regularly use MBR, from grocery shopping to booking holidays and I have saved heaps of money on things that I would spend money on anyway!! I’ve always been an advocate of the scheme and it definitely is something that has “engaged” me as an employee of BCC. It’s a shame to see such negative comments 🙁
In life everyone has an angle. Bottom line in this august group of readers is that you have a satisfied client and employee perspective and sage commentators versed in the challenges of public sector. Tim very much seems to be on the outside looking in for whom satisfaction is not his cup of tea.
Not excuses Pauline but reasons !
In the context of the demogrpahic then the numbers ARE impressive.
Usually these schemes are easy to implement and do have a very quick positive impact – the issue here is that not enough context is given in the article to the particular issues of the large local government employment landscape.
Local authorities have been considering and, in some cases, implementing these schemes for at least 30 years. At first glance, they appear to be win-win: no cost to the employer and voluntary access to savings by employees.
The reasons a number of local authorities have decided not to implement them include: (1) there is no such thing as “no cost”. At the very least there is the lost opportunity to spend staff time, IT resources, etc on a different employee benefit (2) as the tax collector for all businesses in its area, should a local authority be seen to be favouring some local businesses over others (3) particularly for those local authorities which are Trading Standards authorities, might it risk the reputation of even handedness – particularly in those businesses not in the scheme and having action taken against them by staff who benefit from a relationship, endorsed by the Council, with a rival business (4) will employees who feel that they have received poor service from a “recommended” business feel that their employer should exercise a duty of care by compensating them. One local authority (I think it was Tameside) had significant problems from the inclusion of a local Financial Adviser in their scheme who turned out to be engaged in fraud, was prosecuted and jailed. The employees who had been cheated out of their savings felt that the Council, as their employer who had recommended the scheme, should compensate them.
A majority of public sector employees are members of large trade unions, all of which run similar schemes.
Points to ponder.
I’ve pondered on Stephen’s points. And pondered. 1. There is negligent client-side IT time to spend on these programmes. It all comes down to getting the message out to employees and companies like Asperity are extremely good at facilitating that with eye-catching collateral. 2. Councils are not having to exhibit the wisdom of Solomon – no favouring is involved. Quite the reverse actually as many councils use programmes like this to facilitate their strategies of supporting local businesses. 3. see 2 above. 4. is surely more of an issue of financial regulation than a fault of employee benefit programmes. Besides, a well written Supplier Charter should address/weed out miscreant suppliers. As for Trade Union provision, all well and good but most of those schemes have no underlying deal governance or seven day HelpDesks and certainly will not be capable of tailoring benefits communication to individual employers.
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