Employee Benefits
How putting all benefits in one place is a step in creating a strong company culture
20-02-2023
For a benefits strategy to align with the employee experience and culture you aspire to, you need to create a single place for employees to keep coming back to
The quality of employee experience you are prepared to deliver describes what you think of your people, but reward leaders are hindered in their efforts to provide an exceptional employee experience.
Research shows that 86% of employees would like to get all the benefits, content and resources from their employer in one place. Yet HR leaders are often managing disjointed systems across benefits, wellbeing, culture, engagement and communication.
Delivering employee wellbeing is the main priority for 78% of reward leaders. Yet organisations rarely have a unified digital home for wellbeing and few employees are aware of where to go to access workplace wellbeing initiatives.
Meanwhile, 89% of employees want an online recognition tool that lets them recognise colleagues for embodying company culture and values. Yet recognition tools are often siloed.
Many benefits platforms focus on those benefits where there is choice, selection, or membership. But this misses a large part of the story for employees, for example policies, content, education, and benefits available without selection.
Enabling awareness, understanding – and action
For a benefits strategy to align with the employee experience and culture you aspire to, you need to create a single place for employees to keep coming back to learn how these benefits can help them, understand the detail of what is on offer and, most importantly, take action.
By building spaces and content around the key themes that are important to your organisation, reward directors can land their key messages to employees better. They can explain how, and why, they think about benefits the way they do, and how their offering aligns to the business and culture.
That way, accessing and understanding benefits becomes a daily event, rather than a once-a-year or once-a-quarter selection.
Creating one home for reward, benefits and culture
Organisational culture is becoming increasingly important as employees, who may have struggled through the coronavirus pandemic and are now dealing with the cost-of-living crisis, prioritise working for employers who are compassionate, caring and concerned about their wellbeing.
Benefits, rewards and recognition need to have a clear link to organisational values for culture to thrive. And workplace technology should always serve those values and include a brief to bring the organisational culture to life.
Often, cultural information is fragmented – some might be buried on the intranet, some might be delivered during induction, some might be communicated during recruitment, and so on – but there needs to be specific place where it can all be brought together for prospective and current employees.
One organisation doing this particularly well is energy provider EDF. It has changed the way its employees interact with benefits by creating dynamic content and a news feed beyond the benefits election. As a result, 60% of employees are logging in every month, rather than waiting for the election window.
It’s time to elevate the benefits platform and recognise the importance of employee benefits in creating and maintaining a strong company culture.
Originally posted on REBA
20-02-2023
