Offering a broad range of valued employee benefits is a widely acknowledged way to improve staff loyalty, motivation and attendance. It’s also an important part of any staff recruitment strategy as many potential employees’ decisions on whether or not to join you will be based on ‘the package’ on the table.
The number and range of benefits being provided by employers is growing as they compete to attract and retain much sought-after talent. Alongside traditional benefits such as group pension, death in service benefit and health insurance are newer options such as mental wellbeing, 24/7 online GP services, access to financial health clinics and cycle to work schemes.
But how do employers gauge whether a benefit is appreciated and / or whether it is achieving the hoped-for outcomes? In other words, how can employers demonstrate the value of their investment in employee benefit schemes?
The first step, as with any objective setting exercise, is to identify exactly what ‘success’ looks like. This could be expressed as a minimum percentage uptake of the particular benefit and analysed according to the level of employee who is selecting it. Most of today’s employee benefits providers (including those available through Brunsdon Financial) are able to routinely offer such reporting functions.
This kind of quantitative information is very useful and informative but won’t necessarily tell the whole story. Other metrics will also be important for employers and may lie behind their initial decision to introduce employee benefits. For example, they may be aiming to increase employee loyalty and job satisfaction or to reduce sickness absence levels. If that’s the case, employers will want to have systems in place to measure these things. Sickness absence levels and staff turnover data can be relatively easily collated and trends measured over time. Job satisfaction levels can be captured through regularly surveying employees and comparing year-on-year results. As an employer, you would hope to see an improvement in all such measures. Although it will be difficult to directly associate any single improving trend with your employee benefits package, a combined data set of positive quantitative and qualitative scores could be used to indicate a positive impact.
Of course, for some employers return on investment is not the point. The reason for introducing employee benefits is simply to demonstrate their underlying business value of caring for their staff. They want to talk the talk and walk the walk.
Whatever your objectives in introducing group employee benefits, you will want to see a good uptake. If you find that you’re falling short of your targets, it will be important to find out why. Communicating what’s on offer will be critical. After all, if your staff don’t know what’s available to them, then you shouldn’t be surprised if no one joins! It’s also important to offer benefits that are valued and relevant to your employees, are regularly reviewed and keep abreast of societal, legal and workplace developments.
Brunsdon Financial’s Employee Benefits Consultants can support you to develop a group employee benefits scheme that meets your specific business objectives. Please do contact us for further information or advice.
Source 1:
https://employeebenefits.co.uk/data-roi-benefits-strategy/?nocache=true&adfesuccess=1
Source 2:
https://www.sage.com/en-gb/blog/how-effective-is-your-employee-benefits-scheme/
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