Employers with plans to implement a company car scheme must ensure that they engage staff in the process, according to Chris Chandler, principal consultant at Lex Autolease in an interview with Clare Bettelley, associate editor at Employee Benefits.
At the Employee Benefits Fleet Debate in August, Chandler said: ”It’s really important that [employers] get an understanding of what [their] employees actually value right from the beginning. It sounds obvious, but we’ve seen schemes where [employers have] tried to push ahead with what they think employees and then subsequently find out down the line that actually it’s not how employees hoped the scheme would be created.”
Chandler advised employers to engage employee representatives and workshop groups early on in the scheme implementation process, so that they feel engaged and that their organisation’s benefits system has been created for them and with them rather than just dictated to them.
He added: ”[Employers] must also understand what competitors are doing. At the end of the day, this is where [their] employees may migrate to if [their] package isn’t sufficient.”
Chandler was one of eight guests to attend Employee Benefits’ Fleet roundtable debate, which gathered the fleet industry’s leading specialists to debate current market trends and topical issues such as salary sacrifice car schemes and fuel cards.
