
So, you’re researching employee benefits, possibly looking to implement new benefits or refresh your existing offering. Great! You’re joining 84% of other businesses that utilise employee benefits technology according to research by Employee Benefits.
An up-to-date and highly relevant employee benefits provision is as important as ever as employers compete to recruit, retain and engage talent.
Research by Randstad UK at the end of 2021 found 24% are planning a career change within three to six months.
There’s been a ton of change in recent years in the way we all live and work.
These emerging trends in what businesses need and what employees are looking for in their work are crucial for building a suitable employee benefits package that helps support the delivery of HR and business objectives and support employees.
Contents
- The importance of an up-to-date and effective employee benefits package
- Where to start with employee benefits?
- Costs and your employee benefits budget
- Research
- Employee benefits platforms
- Employee benefit schemes
- Reward and Recognition
- Finding the right employee benefits providers
- Employee benefits communication, optimisation and ensuring take-up
- Grow your employee benefits provision with your business
- How we can help you
The importance of an up-to-date and effective employee benefits package
Not only is the competition for talent extremely hot right now, the way we work has changed and so our demands from our employers have changed too.
Randstad UK also found in their research that 69% of employees felt confident about moving to a new role within a few months.
Experts suggest that what’s been commonly referred to as the Great Resignation has been prompted by:
- a high number of vacancies following a period of economic growth
- employees who had held their positions through the pandemic who we’re unhappy in their role
- increased employee burnout through the pandemic.
Not only that, our demands and priorities have changed in our personal lives.
We want things greener and more environmentally friendly, healthier, and cheaper.
The cost of living has and will continue to strain finances. We value time with our loved ones even more following extended lockdowns.
Our health has come further under the spotlight through COVID-19. Our financial futures have become more important following job losses and job insecurity through the pandemic.
All these changes translate to new demands of our employers and particularly in terms of what we want from our employee benefits.
While changes to pay and compensation can help combat issues such as inflation to an extent, employee benefits help address the wide range of new and more prominent priorities employees have today.
There’s lots to consider when it comes to employee benefits, so hopefully this guide can help you build an employee benefits package your employees love.
BLOG: How to choose the right employee benefits package
Where to start with employee benefits?
Well, depending on the size and makeup of your business, you may already have a set-in-stone reward, benefits and compensation strategy in place and a clear idea of what your employees want and where you want to go.
You might already have a clear idea of what your business goals are and how HR and employee benefits will help support them.
In this employee benefits guide, we’ll cover all your options when it comes to employee benefits to help support the implementation of those strategies and the achievement of those business and HR objectives.
However, you might find you need a little helping hand understanding what types of benefits you ought to be looking for or the benefits your employees will value most, to help form the right strategy and approach.
There’s a few things to consider here, employee research and your employee benefits budget.
Costs and your employee benefits budget
Let’s look at budget first. There are different types of budgets as you may already know.
We cover budgeting for employee benefits in our guide to your employee benefits budget, but we often recommend businesses survey and thoroughly research their employees first to determine:
- What key issues or challenges employees are facing right now
- What benefits they want, need or might support those challenges
- The type of platform functionality needed, e.g. mobile optimisation or an app for example.
Ideally, this information should then determine what budget is needed.
This approach puts the needs of the business and employees first before budget is considered.
In theory, even if this means an increased budget is needed, you should see a better ROI from your benefits by having exactly what your employees and your business needs.
Doing this should help hit those retention, recruitment and engagement targets by delivering exactly what’s needed.
However, sometimes the reality is that budget comes first and perhaps all departments, not just HR, have to convince the C-suite of the projected ROI before they’re granted a zero-based budgeting approach, where the needs and requirements are determined before budgets are set.
This is particularly true in the current financial climate coming through a pandemic and into soaring inflation and therefore soaring business costs.
Research
For smaller businesses, conversations with employees and plenty of good quality qualitative feedback will be enough to get a good idea of how to approach employee benefits.
For medium to larger businesses, surveys are typically one of the most common ways to gain feedback. When it comes to research around employee benefits, we recommend delving deeper into the challenges employees are facing as opposed to referencing benefits directly.
If employees are asked if they want a green car scheme for example, they might not know enough about the scheme or its advantages.
Employees might have some incorrect preconceptions and perceive the scheme to be too expensive, for example.
Alternatively, if you ask “are you considering driving electric in future?” or directly reference habits and attitudes towards the environment and climate change, it may uncover a potential demand for electric vehicles or ULEVs.
By understanding the priorities of your employees first, you and your employee benefits provider can make an informed decision on which benefits will suit your employees best.
Employees don’t always know the ins and outs of the schemes available, but they know what their problems are, what their priorities are and what they need.
If you’ve already got an employee benefits package in place and you want to improve or refresh, this should provide a raft of extra data to pull together (engagement, up-take, scheme applications etc.) to do a proper investigation into the strengths and weaknesses of your current employee benefits set-up.
Any insights gained from this data can be fed into any surveys or employee forums for example to get the conversation going about where improvements can be made.
Improvements can be made in all areas. It could be your communications or changing employee demands that are helping or hindering your employee benefits set-up.
The wide range of employee benefits available today make this exercise more than worthwhile as benefits can help address a range of issues employees may have.
BLOG: What are the best employee benefits?
Employee benefits platforms
After the research is done and the key problems and opportunities have been identified, mapping out requirements can be considered.
An employee benefits provider will be able to help with this, advising on the range of options available.
Let’s start with platforms. Many businesses already have one and some develop their own in-house, but this amounts to just 12% of organisations according to research by Employee Benefits.
The same research found that the most popular route for businesses is to go direct to a provider.
At caboodle, we work with businesses to provide employee benefits and a platform that’s right for them and their employees and we never recommend something if we don’t believe it’s right.
There are loads of things an employee benefits platform can do for you. Here are just a few of the key features.
Hosting all your employee benefits in one place
Working with different employee benefits scheme providers can be difficult to manage, time consuming and costly.
An employee benefits platform provider typically already works with loads of individual providers and already has a selection of benefits to choose from.
With a “one-stop-shop” there’s no chasing or dealing with multiple suppliers, all your reporting is in one place and you can manage all your schemes from one platform.
It’s easier for employees too who can access all their benefits in one place.
Flexible benefits
Flexible benefits technology is as popular as ever and is a no-brainer for most businesses.
Some perceive flexible benefits to be costly, but they most often provide a better ROI on employee benefits spend by providing more choice, more personalisation and a better employee benefits experience.
International capabilities
A global employee benefits platform allows you to manage employee benefits internationally.
Workforces are increasingly remote, and the right platform can ensure fairness and consistency in terms of reward and benefits for employees wherever they are.
Managing this without a platform can get complicated, with different currencies, languages and time-zones.
An employee benefits platform with the right functionality can make all this a whole lot easier.
Marketing and employee benefits communications
An employee benefits platform can help automate, host and produce marketing and communications to help you make the most of your employee benefits, help achieve a better take-up and communicate advantages of schemes to employees.
Platform branding
Different platforms offer different levels of branding to help you leverage your internal brand and improve relationships with employees.
Enhanced UX and UI
An expertly developed platform incorporates enhanced UX and UI to make employee benefits more accessible, easier to find and easier to manage for employees.
Reward and Recognition
Dedicated reward and recognition tools can be integrated into an employee benefits platform to help keep everything under one roof.
Other benefits
Other benefits include payroll reporting, management information, help desk support, document hosting, single sign-on and loads more.
For more, head over to our platform overview, compare platforms and see which would be right for your business.
Bespoke vs. off-the-shelf platforms
No two businesses are the same and we’ve always maintained this. Our employee benefits platforms are very flexible for this reason.
Some businesses go for an off-the-shelf platform, a one-stop-shop to host employee benefits and an easy place to manage everything.
Alternatively, some go for a bespoke, flexible and fully customised employee benefits platform which we’ve developed for clients like Toyota, Nissan and Computershare for example.
These are platforms are designed to meet complex requirements which lots of businesses have.
It’s only right that businesses want a platform that’s completely unique to them and their employees, designed specifically for their employees’ needs.
The possibilities with a bespoke employee benefits platform are endless, and whatever your requirements there’s always a solution.
Employee benefit schemes
Moving on from platforms, let’s look at employee benefit schemes.
In short, there’s loads to choose from. Employee benefits stretch from schemes like the Bike Scheme where employees can save on the cost of a new bike, through to the EAP designed to support employees with their mental health.
We categorise the schemes we provide by financial wellbeing, health and wellbeing, salary sacrifice, work place benefits and commuting and lifestyle benefits where employees can save on shopping for example.
Let’s look at each in a bit more depth.
BLOG: What are the different types of employee benefits?
Financial wellbeing
These include benefit schemes designed to help employees cut costs, save, solve short term financial problems and build long term positive financial habits.
Our range of financial wellbeing employee benefit schemes include:
- Workplace ISAs
- Financial Planning
- MotorSave
- Christmas Club
- Financial Education
There are other schemes which can help employees save, including the Bike to Work scheme for example. But these schemes focus primarily on finances and the day-to-day costs we all face.
Employee financial wellbeing is high on the agenda for many HR teams and organisations. Mental wellbeing is too and there’s lots of research to show there are strong links between the two.
Good financial wellbeing supports better mental wellbeing, strengthening the importance of financial wellbeing employee benefits.
Find out more about these schemes on our Financial Wellbeing benefits page.
Health and wellbeing
There’s a huge range of health and wellbeing employee benefits out there, ranging from benefits to support mental wellbeing such as the Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) to benefits to support physical wellbeing such as Health Assessments.
Our range of schemes include:
- Health Cash Plan
- Eyecare
- Occupational Health
- Healthy Living Resource Centre
- Valuable Health Assessments
- Dental Cover
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Gym Scheme
- Bike to Work Scheme
Health and wellbeing benefits can be thought of from a few different angles. There’s physical and mental wellbeing and preventive vs. reactional measures.
Ideally, businesses ought to aim for a health and wellbeing benefits provision that spans across each of these measures to provide a well-rounded, holistic health and wellbeing support package.
In terms of recent trends, we’re seeing more businesses taking a pro-active approach to helping employees manage their health.
Research by publication Employee Benefits in 2020 showed 87% offer employee benefits to support health and wellbeing.
For more, take a look at our range of health and wellbeing employee benefits.
Salary sacrifice
Salary sacrifice schemes still play a huge part in many employee benefits provisions.
These schemes help employees save on Tax and NI while helping employers save too.
With the right scheme take-up, salary sacrifice schemes can even work out cost-neutral for businesses, making them not only beneficial for employees but cost-effective for the business too.
While Childcare Vouchers have been phased out to new entrants, those that were still on the scheme before its closure still benefit and switching to a new benefits provider for an employer is still possible without affecting employees on the scheme.
The Childcare Voucher scheme certainly was and still is popular for those still on it, however, new salary sacrifice schemes have come in in recent years to bolster employee benefits provisions and help employees and employers save too.
Our range of salary sacrifice benefits include:
- MotorSave
- Holiday Trading
- Bike to Work Scheme
- Car Benefit Scheme
Savings for employers and employees vary from scheme to scheme.
What’s certain for each scheme though is that they’ll benefit employees and almost certainly provide better savings than can be found elsewhere.
Keep a keen eye out in future for any changes to salary sacrifice too.
The UK Government often use salary sacrifice schemes as a vehicle to support policies, for example with the Car Benefit Scheme where Benefit-in-Kind tax was cut for ULEVs to encourage employees to drive electric.
For more, take a look at our full range of salary sacrifice schemes.
Workplace benefits and commuting
Now many of us are returning to the workplace in some capacity and as travel begins to open back up again, employers are considering ways to use employee benefits to support the commute.
Whichever way you commute, whether it be by bus, rail, tram, bike or car for example, there are benefits available to help make getting to and from work easier for employees.
Our range of commuting benefits include:
- Liftshare
- Commuting Loans
- Bike to Work Scheme
These schemes cover almost all modes of commute aside from those lucky enough to be within walking distance of the workplace.
Even then, schemes like the Bike to Work scheme can make the commute less time consuming.
For more, browse through our commuting benefits.
Lifestyle employee benefits
Employee benefits offer employees a huge range of ways to save.
Aside from salary sacrifice schemes and financial wellbeing, there’s employee discounts and schemes like the Technology Scheme, specifically designed to provide unique savings and make things like brand new tech much more affordable.
Our range of lifestyle benefits include:
- Technology Scheme
- Instant Discount Codes
- Cinema Benefits
- Offers and Discounts
- Holiday Discounts and much more.
These schemes are about much more than just discounts on the occasional treat here or day out there.
In some cases, as with Instant Discount Codes, employees can save on their weekly or monthly shop and in many cases save hundreds across the course of a year.
With the cost of living rising, employee lifestyle benefits are becoming even more valuable not just for employees but for employers too.
For more, discover our full range of lifestyle employee benefits.
Your own unique company employee benefits
Most companies provide their own unique and quirky benefits and perks.
Perks like Pawternity Leave, monthly free coffees and charity donations, should you provide them, can also be incorporated into your employee benefits platform alongside the benefits mentioned in this guide.
These unique perks often make employers stand out in what’s already a competitive labour market.
We help employees incorporate their unique perks and benefits into their employee benefits platform along with the benefits mentioned here. Find out more here.
Core and additional benefits
Employee benefits span a wide range of areas. Other benefits include:
- Pension contributions
- Annual leave and time off
- Death in service/life assurance.
- Occupational sick pay
- Private Medical Insurance
- Group risk insurance including group life assurance, group income protection and group critical illness
- Company cars
- Concierge services
- Share schemes.
We can advise and even incorporate these into your employee benefits platform too. For more information on this, get in touch.
Reward and Recognition
The functionality of employee benefits platforms doesn’t stop there.
Reward and Recognition technology can be incorporated too to create a true one-stop-shop for all things reward and benefits.
These include things like:
- Peer-to-Peer Recognition
- Employee Awards
- Employee Rewards.
Personalised peer-to-peer Ecards, monetary and non-monetary rewards can all be managed through an employee benefits platform to improve employee engagement and reward and recognise employees effectively.
There’s more on this in our Complete Guide to Reward and Recognition.
Finding the right employee benefits providers
Now the research is done, and the requirements drawn up, it’s time to find the right employee benefits providers.
The right provider will be able to deliver your requirements, advise on any additional employee benefits or benefits that aren’t right for you, build a solution to your specifications or provide off-the-shelf version that already fits your needs, and importantly, do all this in budget.
We’ve done this for over 2,000 clients of all shapes and sizes across multiple industries, sectors and continents to help businesses provide an employee benefits provision that’s right for them and their employees.
For more information on this, get in touch.
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Employee benefits communication, optimisation and ensuring take-up
For optimum take-up, good employee benefits communication is key.
In Employee Benefits’ 2020 research, they found 67% predicted benefits strategy changing towards more of a focus on better or more targeted communication of benefits in future.
Some modes of communicating your employee benefits include:
- Posters
- Handouts
- Emails
- In-platform notifications
- Mobile app notifications
- Seminars and workshops
- Meetings
- Letters
- Induction packs
- Staff Handbook
- Noticeboards
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but many of the popular forms of employee benefits communication are included here.
An employee benefits provider will support in creating and providing marketing and communication material, both digital and physical, to support employee benefits engagement.
With bespoke platforms and services, providers will often create bespoke communications including emails, handouts and posters to support scheme and platform launches and ongoing employee benefits engagement and take-up.
Moving forward, your benefits provider should not only consult on which benefits have and will provide value for your business and employees, but benefits which aren’t right too, to ensure the continual optimisation of your employee benefits provision.
We’ve found success with our clients with this approach as an employee benefits provider. For more on how we can help your business with employee benefits, get in touch.
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Grow your employee benefits provision with your business
Often, we find clients come to us as fast-growing start-ups or even existing enterprises who branch out into new countries and continents, and they want a platform that’s capable of growing with them.
With this in mind, another key thing to look out for is not just a platform that works right now, but a platform and provider that can provide further functionality and support in future.
For example, international reward technology and currency conversion functionality within an employee benefits platform can provide all the futureproofing needed to ensure the employee benefits platform grows with your business.
You can read more about how we’ve done this for our client Acacium Group.
Your requirements when it comes to employee benefits should be dictated by what you and your employees need and not by what you might think providers are capable of or what may seem feasible.
At caboodle, we’re flexible to meet the needs of any type of business, so we can develop the right solution for your business and your employees.
Need more help with employee benefits?
The topic of employee benefits is broader than you may think. There are lots of areas to cover which we can and do advise clients with on a regular basis. We’ve covered lots of the key areas here but there’s still much more to it.
We provide employee benefits to over 2,000 clients and our employee benefits platform goes out to hundreds of thousands of employees globally.
If you’re looking to implement employee benefits for your business, boost engagement, recruitment, retention and reward your team, get in touch and we’ll run through everything with you.