What a year it has been! While we get ready to move into another year of change and unknowns, let’s take a moment to look at what has changed, for the better:
- There’s been a drive for employees to be allowed flexible working arrangements, including remote working where possible.
- Employers are taking a good look at work/life balance, with trials into four-day working weeks, without impacting pay.
- Mental wellness is becoming a priority in the workplace.
- Employers are doing more to help tackle financial stress through their benefits offering.
Now more than ever, access to relevant and diverse employee benefits are crucial. Gone are the days of archaic systems that only office-based staff can access. And we wave goodbye to old fashioned benefits that don’t resonate with a multi-generational workforce who have high expectations of their employers.
It is time to look to the future and make plans for how to improve employee benefits and how our teams access them! Here are our top three New Years’ Resolutions that every company should take note of before we tiptoe into 2022:
1. It’s time to listen to our employees
Aon have been researching employee benefits and trends since 2010. Their latest 2021 survey gave the following insights:
- Nearly a third of employers are not conducting any research or request feedback to understand their employees’ needs.
- 98% of employers think it is important to increase their understanding and engagement with benefits and/or wellbeing.
- 98% of employers agree that they have a responsibility for influencing employee health and helping adapt their behaviours for the better hood of their wellbeing.
It shouldn’t be rocket science or particularly innovative to discover that to please our teams, we must hear them. HR departments know as well as any others that an echo chamber is not how you engage and boost morale.
One of the focal areas of the FlexGenius offering is the ease in communications and gathering feedback from your employees.
We split our communication tools into three core areas:
Announce
Allows you to push news and views within your personalised, branded benefits platform. There is also the option to automate emails when a new announcement is published, encouraging your staff to login, and read updates.
Target
We allow you to segment your employees any way you wish. This means you can make sure you send relevant updates to the right people.
Survey
Our inbuilt survey tool enables you to create surveys, email your staff to participate, collect their feedback, and review and publish results.
2. Make sure your employee benefits offering is accessible!
One of the core blockers to employee engagement with their benefits is access. Whether that is lack of awareness, or the fact they need to seemingly jump through hoops of fire to access them, it should be yesterday’s problem.
Many of our clients have given praise to our digital employee benefits interface. Those with workforces who are not office based need a system that allows access without the need for a corporate email address. Take Crest Nicholson, for example, who came to us with this exact requirement, and have since achieved a 79% engagement rate.
3. Offer (and keep track of!) relevant benefits
Having the ability to report on which benefits have the highest uptake and those that get low to no engagement is important to understanding their value within your business. That, in tandem with feedback surveys, is a good way to measure if you are providing what your employees really want.
We believe that every aspect of your employee benefits strategy must be flexible to be successful. From easy, secure access, to the ability to analyse and switch up your offering. That’s why our HR analytics tool is one of the most important areas of our platform.
Summary
While it is impossible to know what will be. With careful planning we can at least make sure we are able to help take care of our employees. Pandemic, endemic or not, our duty of care should always remain at the top of our to do list in HR. Making sure we can offer the right kinds of benefits and listen to our employees is always a good place to start.
If you’d like to have a chat about how we can help you, get in touch or book a demo today.