A well implemented employee benefits package helps to support your employees with many of their needs. It can also help improve employee engagement, reduce employee absences and improve employee satisfaction.
There are some costs that come with implementing employee benefits but when it comes to the advantages your business and your employees gain, it’s more than worth it.
We spoke recently about some of the costs related to employee benefits, in this article we’ll look at how to ensure your company gets the best value from its employee benefits package.
Range of benefits
One important way to ensure that you get the best value from your employee benefits package is to provide a wide range of schemes for your employees.
It might seem like providing more schemes will be more costly and whilst it can cost more than only providing one or a few schemes, the return of
more schemes can be higher and this can be a more cost-effective approach.
Offering as wide a range of employee benefits as you possibly can means you’re able to support as many employees as possible with their priorities.
Conducting research to find out what your employee’s priorities and problems are can help you implement schemes that support these, so straight away you’re providing employee benefits that are most likely to be utilised more.
Reviewing your offering
The employee benefits you set up to begin with may serve your employees well, but over time their priorities will change and where possible your employee benefits offering should change too.
It’s important to know exactly what needs to change too though, otherwise you run the risk of removing schemes that are still useful for employees.
Running regular employee surveys can be useful in a couple of ways. The first option is to run employee surveys to get a sense of what your employees need support with.
You can shape these surveys to get the information you need but to also give employees the chance to add a little bit of extra commentary in to elaborate on their answers.
The second option is to run a survey to give employees the chance to express their opinions on the employee benefits they have access to.
This feedback can range from what schemes they use most regularly, what they enjoy most about having their employee benefits and things that they wish there were more options to support with.
Once you have the information from these surveys, you can use it to help you to get some idea of what needs to change going forward.
If you provide your employee benefits through a dedicated platform, then you should be able to see how often your employee benefits are being used.
Being able to break down how your employee benefits are being used by individual schemes is useful because you’ll be able to focus on the right things.
When you have this information, you can talk to your employee benefits provider about ways to drive engagement and best optimise your employee benefits offering.
Communication and marketing
Once you’ve identified how your employee benefits offering could be improved, you have several options to ensure this happens.
An option you have is to look at the way schemes are communicated. Have a look at whether it’s clear what the scheme is, how to use it and how it helps support employees.
If your employees don’t understand this basic information, they’re less likely to use the schemes available to them.
Make sure you know the places employees can get this information. Whether it’s from you, the employee benefits platform or a customer service team offered by your employee benefits provider.
Letting employees know where they can find support and information means their questions can be answered quickly, which makes it easier for employees to use what’s available to them.
Another choice you have to communicate with your employees about their available benefits schemes is by using marketing materials. These can be used to not only inform your employees about their schemes but get them excited about using them.
There are different options available for marketing materials and all of them have their own pluses in communicating with your employees.
Posters are a great choice when it comes to engaging employees on the go. These can be included in employee handbooks when onboarding and can be digitised to be included on employee communications through apps or emails.
Emails allow you to get the attention of employees in different ways.
They give your employees the chance to read the information when it’s convenient for them.
Your employee benefits provider may provide this material for you, so you don’t have to spend the time producing emails.
For when your employees need more specific information about the way an employee benefit works, then a handout can be the best option. A scheme handout helps to lay out all the information that employees need to know about a scheme and how to use it. This is a great way to make sure that employees also understand how a scheme can help support them.
Your employee benefits provider might already have these materials available so it’s worth asking. If they don’t then you can work with them to create one, so that you can ensure that the information is accurate.
Monetary savings
Although it’s important for you to keep in mind the non-monetary value that employee benefits can bring to your company, you will of course want to know more about the ways they can save your company and employees money too.
One big way you can save and help employees save is by implementing salary sacrifice schemes.
Salary sacrifice schemes are employee benefits where the employee sacrifices part of their monthly gross salary to pay back for an item or service received.
A classic example of this is the Bike Scheme, where employees can get a bike from the supplier and pay back the cost from repayments from their monthly salary. This helps make the item more affordable and accessible for employees.
As the employee has a part of their salary sacrificed to pay for the item, both you and the employee will benefit from tax and national insurance savings.
Another option to help employees save money is by offering schemes like Employee Discounts or a Gym Scheme, for example.
These schemes help your employees to get items or services at a discount which opens the chance to access them in a more affordable and accessible way.
Although schemes like these don’t directly save your company money, they are still worthwhile thinking about in terms of cost because they save your employees money and you as the employer can use them too, to save some money of your own!
They can also help your company when it comes to boosting morale, satisfaction and engagement amongst employees. You can use your employee benefits to support employees with their challenges outside of work. The support with these challenges help make it easier for employees to engage fully with their work which benefits your company as a whole.
Getting the best value from your employee benefits will depend on how much you spend as this will change the financial return on investment you need. However, the value comes from more than just the financial side of things and includes the boosts in employee engagement, improvement in your employee’s health and wellbeing and more employee satisfaction.
For more information on how to introduce employee benefits like these to your employees, take a look at our range of employee benefit schemes designed to support your employees and boost employee engagement.