How to choose the right employee benefits package

Your employee benefits package is crucial to retention, recruitment and creating a great employee experience.

Here, we look at:

• Employee feedback driving your employee benefits package decisions
• Your employee benefits budget
• The types of employee benefits available
• Choosing the right employee benefits supplier/provider for your business.

With this guide, we hope to support you in creating an employee benefits package your employees genuinely love. Read on for more!

GUIDE: Employee Benefits: The complete buyers guide

 

Communicate with employees

It sounds simple, but this can make or break the success of your employee benefits package. It’s not just about listening to your employees but listening to them well.

Your employees are in the best position to communicate to you just what it’s like working for your company and where there’s potential room for improvement.

It could be surveys, focus groups or forums for example, find effective ways to communicate with your employees.

Don’t just ask about employee benefits, as your staff may not know what benefits are out there. Ask how you can genuinely improve their lives. Any research you gather or communication you have with your employees on a wider HR level is important here. It’ll help you put together an employee benefits package that makes a genuine difference to the lives of your employees and their loved ones.

Your employee benefits package forms one part of the overall employee experience, and in providing a solid set of benefits your employees can genuinely take advantage of, you have the opportunity to improve the employee experience and make a real difference.

 

Your employee benefits budget

Research by Employee Benefits shows 84% say budget is the main barrier to introducing employee benefits.

Every penny you spend on benefits will be under scrutiny, and in the current climate this is probably true for many departments across your business.

Something we’ve said before and always maintained is that employee benefits should be seen as an investment and not a cost.

That said, you’ll need to budget for your benefits carefully and consider how you might demonstrate an ROI.

While the overall aim is to create a great employee experience and genuinely improve the lives of your employees, unfortunately where budget is concerned often ROI comes into the conversation.

For more, read our full guide on how to budget for employee benefits.

 

Research the different types of benefits on offer

Thankfully, there are lots of employee benefits out there to choose from. There are benefits to support employee health and wellbeing, financial wellbeing, salary sacrifice benefits and loads more. There’s even benefits to help your employees save on their shopping.

Again, this goes back to the communication with your employees. You’ve got lots of benefits to choose from, but which ones will make a genuine difference to their lives? And how might they fit into your budget?

Another thing to consider here is flexible benefits technology. Increasingly, employers are turning to flexible benefits technology to provide a more personalised employee benefits package to their staff.

This may add a little more to your budget, but the potential ROI greatly outweighs this. Flexible benefits technology can be the secret ingredient to turn a good employee benefits package into a great one.

 

Choosing the right supplier

So, you know what your employees want, you know your budget and you’ve decided what benefits you’d like to offer your staff. The next step is choosing an employee benefits provider that will tie everything together and provide you and your employees with exactly what you need and crucially, in budget.

You could go to individual benefits suppliers and source each benefit yourself, or even build your own in-house platform. However, taking your requirements to a provider means you can take advantage of their experience and development skills and expertise and create your ideal employee benefits package.

You’ll also get support communicating your benefits and making the most of your employee benefits package, getting the best ROI.

You’ll also be able to take advantage of all the great tools and features of an employee benefits platform to truly get the most out of your benefits.

 

Refining your employee benefits package moving forward

Moving forward, you’ll of course want to optimise your benefits to make sure your employees really are getting the most out of them.

If you use an employee benefits provider, be sure to draw on their experience to maximise engagement with your employee benefits package.

If you use flexible benefits technology and it’s proving popular, you could even make a case for increasing your flexible benefits allowance to support employees in making the most of their benefits.

Continual optimisation and refinement of your benefits package as your business and the world changes is crucial to ensuring your benefits continue to make a real difference to the lives of your employees.

 

There’s lots to get right when it comes to choosing the right employee benefits package. The rewards for doing so are a great employee experience and making a genuine difference to the lives of your employees!