EXCLUSIVE: Employees at no-contract gym provider The Gym Group have saved £100,000 since April 2016 by using the organisation’s retail discounts platform.
The Gym Group, which has 700 employees, introduced the platform in April 2016 as part of a three-year deal with employee experience organisation Perkbox.
Providing access to retail discounts, offers and free products, The Gym Group originally implemented the Perkbox platform to provide employees with a wide choice of benefits, empowering staff to select deals that would be most relevant or valuable to them. This includes, for example, discounts on food shopping, holidays, cinema tickets, protein shakes, Virgin Wines and Apple products, to name a few. Employees are also able to purchase phone insurance and receive free Caffe Nero coffees.
Ann-Marie Murphy (pictured), director of people and development at The Gym Group, explained: “What it’s really enabled us to do, as a small [to] medium business, [is] to give our employees access to a wide range of perks and benefits, which means there’s something for everybody in the most cost-effective way.
“The business is all about customers and providing them with products and services they want; we wanted to do something [similar] for our employees. For a business that’s not massive, that hasn’t got the resources or necessarily the purchasing capability much larger businesses have, Perkbox gives [us] that variety.”
By 23 March 2019, 450 employees had signed up to use the Perkbox platform, which is accessible via an app or on the staff intranet. These employees have redeemed just under 6,000 offers since April 2016, and the log on rate for the platform is 92.1%. In the last six months, 257 free coffees have been redeemed.
The platform, which also aligns with the organisation’s culture, is primarily communicated to employees using push notifications that direct staff to the app and showcase promotions. Information is also available on the staff intranet.
The Perkbox platform sits alongside The Gym Group’s existing benefits offering, which includes a free gym membership for each employee and one friend or family member, a cycle-to-work scheme and an employee share scheme.
The Gym Group plans to extend its benefits offering this year, by introducing a new sharesave scheme in September 2019. The organisation is also exploring Perkbox’s recognition programme.
This investment in benefits and reward aligns with the business’ growth plans; it is currently moving to employ its personal trainer population, which will take its overall headcount to 2,500 by the end of August 2019.
Murphy said: “[The platform] just gives people access to choice. We have dubbed this year the year of our people and it’s all about celebrating our people and investing in [the] development and engagement of [employees].
“For a business like ours, [the Perkbox platform is] great. It gives us access to a lot more stuff than we might otherwise have.”
