EXCLUSIVE: Sky has outsourced its employee benefits administration to enable the home entertainment and communications organisation to focus on driving its benefits business strategy.
It appointed Capita Employee Benefits in January following a tender process in October 2014.
The provider will look after its pension auto-enrolment, benefits selection, benefits administration, consultancy, helpdesk services and provide support for Sky’s online benefits portal.
John Whitaker, benefits consultant at Sky, said: “We took the opportunity to review the market and, as a team, we ultimately decided that Capita was the best fit for the business.
“We wanted to outsource our benefits administration, because, as reward and HR professionals we can get bogged down with the admin.
“If we are doing administration, we are not adding value to the business. We want to be telling employees about their benefits to help drive the business strategy forward. Our attention will now turn towards that.”
As part of Sky’s three-year strategy, it will work with its provider to ensure its benefits package is fit for purpose for all 22,000 UK employees.
The organisation will use the data underlying its flexible benefits scheme to do this.
Sky will use this data to inform decisions about which benefits it should introduce and which it should stop offering. The organisation is also assessing whether it has the most approproate providers in place for each benefit. As a result of this review, Sky moved its bikes-for-work scheme to provider Halfords.
The organisation plans to continue to work on its offering for its annual enrolment window in July, first reviewing healthcare benefits to determine if they are still delivering on the same premises as when first introduced.
Whitaker said: “There will be a journey that we will manage over three to five years to look at what we will add and remove, where we should be focusing benefits spend and making sure the benefits we offer are fit for purpose.
“We will be looking at healthcare to see if it is still a benefit to all employees or just a small perentage, or are the benefits we are offering for employees’ dependents and partners more than for staff themselves.
“We want to make sure it is still delivering on what it set out to deliver when the policy was first introduced.”