Birmingham City Council employees have made savings of £187,000 through the authority’s online employee discounts scheme. The programme, introduced in November 2011, is used by 8,300 of the council’s 48,000 staff.
£187,000 sounds great, but that works out to 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 two years. I think this story was supposed to make the scheme sound great, but the actual figures make for pretty poor reading when looked at properly.
Tim Warner
I have done something very similar to the Birmingham roll-out and it’s the hardest reward activity I have ever undertaken. A council of this size will have a huge proportion of [its] workforce who are not online at work (school meal supervisors, lollipop people, dustmen, parks and gardens), which means their implementation is slower and takes much longer to educate and bed in. You also seem to have missed the fact that this will have been delivered by a small team that almost certainly did it not as their day job, but alongside it. Your comments are a betrayal of the hard work they will have put in.
JustMe
There are many difficult challenges in the public sector right now and take-up is respectable when you compare it 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.
George Farrow, client services director, Asperity Employee Benefits
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 its employees, who are obviously engaging with this benefit and saving money. This should be celebrated by benefits and reward professionals. It is difficult to engage any employees in benefits, 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.
LDNJohn
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, 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.
Raffaela Goodby is head of organisational development, engagement and wellbeing at Birmingham City Council
Read the full news story and full comments
Goodby will be speaking about HR’s role in employee motivation and engagement at Employee Benefits Live on 26 September at Olympia, London.