EXCLUSIVE: Royal Mail Group receives 1,200 orders for car salary sacrifice scheme

Royal Mail

Royal Mail Group has seen staff place 1,200 orders for cars after launching a salary sacrifice car scheme in March.

It launched its My Drive scheme, which employees can take up at any time and is provided by Zenith, in conjunction with the launch of its flexible benefits plan, branded My Bundle.

During the three-week flex election window in March, the organisation received 55,000 hits on its online reward portal, with 3% of employees making a benefits selection.

The scheme is available for all 140,000 permanent Royal Mail Group employees.

The flex scheme includes: dental cover, life assurance for employees and their partners, health  cash plans, critical illness cover for employees and partners, personal accident cover, travel insurance, health assessments, discounts on products, childcare vouchers and a bikes-for-work scheme.

In addition, Royal Mail Group has created product bundles as part of its offering. This means that if an employee selects two products featured in a product bundle, they will receive a 10% discount on each, regardless of supplier. The product bundles comprise personal accident and travel insurance, and life assurance and critical illness cover for employees or their partners.

Harry Koumourou, benefits and recognition manager at Royal Mail Group, said: “When we first [started] on this journey, we re-visited what Royal Mail provided. It was a very traditional benefits offering to all employees and it became obvious that [these] weren’t uniformly applied across the business  and the choice was quite limited.

“We also wanted to develop something that aligned to and supported our strategic business initiatives, such as our cultural and behavioural agendas and, being a newly privatised company, we wanted to compete on a level playing field with our FTSE 100 peers where the vast majority offered flex, [so in order to] start attracting and retaining talent, we needed to develop our benefits proposition.

“We’re mindful of [making] it a level playing field for everyone. We don’t want to segment what we offer to who.”