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When Fiona Lee, salary sacrifice and staff benefits manager at Newcastle Upon Tyne NHS Foundation Trust, joined the organisation in July 2013, the Benefits Everyone platform was not user-friendly. Despite dealing with a limited budget, the Trust needed to simplify and modernise the way it packaged voluntary benefits for its 14,000-strong workforce.
Working with designers and with a goal to retain the brand but revolutionise the content, Lee developed a site with clear branding, mobile optimisation and simplified, user-friendly processes.
Through the Benefits Everyone platform, employees can access an array of vouchers, discounts, and salary sacrifice products, such as car schemes, bikes-for-work and childcare.
Where before it took 12 steps to process a salary sacrifice car, Lee notes that a core aim was to keep things as simple as possible. Salary sacrifice benefits, for example, are now hosted in one place, each one with a short blurb about what is on offer and how it works, for employees to easily learn and compare.
Lee and her team have also worked to streamline access to the benefits themselves. For example, employees previously had to fill in a form by hand and send it by internal post to apply for a travel pass. These documents then had to be processed and collated, creating administrative work that Lee estimates equated to a full-time role. Moving these forms online has allowed the data to be processed far quicker and with less room for mistakes.
"What this has done for us as a team is allow us to go out and grow the discounts [offering]," says Lee. "It just works like clockwork now, and anyone on the team can pick that up.
"We put it back into the community, work directly with suppliers, and we get great discounts. [As a result,] staff are doing things with their family, and from a wellbeing point of view, having rest and relaxation, and it works really well."
When it comes to discounts and offers, the Newcastle Upon Tyne NHS Foundation Trust provision is extensive; the site currently hosts 215 offers, 136 of which are exclusive to the Trust.
How these deals are packaged is an important element. Lee notes, for example, that following a recent influx of nurses from the Philippines, who might not know the local area yet, providing clear maps and instructions is key.
Some of the vouchers offered through the platform can be taken as part of a salary sacrifice arrangement, which Lee notes becomes particularly popular around Christmas, Father's Day and Mother's Day, as it gives employees a chance to save on gifted experiences.
However, having a range of ways to access offers is also helpful, says Lee: "We have volunteers, and they can't access salary sacrifice, but they can access the discounts and offers. It's quite nice to give something back to the volunteers."
Being largely automated, mobile optimised and user-friendly also helps address the 24-hour nature of the industry. Where Lee's team works standard business hours, employees on night shifts might struggle to contact HR, but can now learn about their benefits at a time that works for them. In addition, for bigger salary sacrifice purchases, such as cars, it is important that staff can access information at home with their families.
"From an NHS standpoint, we stand alone, and I think that's probably the biggest accolade we can shout about. I am exceedingly proud of my team and where we've got to," Lee concludes. "We pull this off for 14,000 staff with great gusto, and we are self-sufficient as a team. Everything that the schemes make as a profit pays for [our salaries]."
