The challenge for businesses in planning and implementing schemes to encourage particular behaviour, such as to increase uptake of an employee benefits or reward scheme, lies in generating and maintaining awareness and understanding of the benefits among the target audiences. In order to be effective and deliver a good return on investment, attention needs to be paid to how information about the scheme is delivered to the target group. The key is effective communication.
Lack of awareness
In many businesses, there’s a great deal of scope for improvement when it comes to benefits communication, our research at Edenred shows that over two-thirds of companies admitted they weren’t doing enough to communicate with staff about their benefits. This approach to communication is clearly having an impact on organisations. Only one fifth of employees (21%) we questioned admitted to fully understanding the value of their benefits.
However, the benefits environment is changing, with more and more organisations waking up to the fact that the communication of benefits is vital in getting the message across. Companies realise that there is no point spending money on rewards and benefits if staff don’t understand them, can’t access them or don’t appreciate them.
What’s more, the current economic climate means that financial spend is under increasing scrutiny and employee benefits and reward schemes now have to be smarter and work harder than ever before.
Examples of effective communication
Here are some examples of some of the organisations we have worked with where innovative communication has played a major role in the success of a project and achieved results.
Quintiles
As the world’s largest clinical and pharmaceutical research services provider, attracting and retaining their key talent is critical to the success of their organisation.
Quintile set about making improvements and changes to its employee benefits scheme. This follows a survey conducted by Mercer in mid-2010, which included analysis of employee preferences and focus groups, and gave Quintiles a better understanding of what its staff valued and what drove engagement.
As a result, in July 2010 Quintiles introduced phase 1 of their new benefits offerings, which they called QChoices. The first phase included the introduction of voluntary benefits, giving employees access to over 400 retailers offering discounted products and services through a voluntary benefits platform.
In October 2010, Quintiles introduced phase 2 of QChoices, offering employees the ability to salary sacrifice their pension contributions and childcare vouchers. In addition, the new online benefits portal was used to pull together and promote their existing benefit programmes, giving employees easy access to this important information.
A comprehensive communications strategy was developed to support the launch of both phases of QChoices. A number of channels were used to ensure that the information was received and understood by all employees – those working in a Quintiles office, a client office or working from home. This included webinars, emails, postcards and posters as well as carefully targeted roadshows.
The QChoices scheme has been well received by employees since it was introduced, with around 85% taking up pensions salary sacrifice, and increasing childcare vouchers uptake to 11%. Looking ahead, Quintiles is seeking to extend the number of benefits that they currently offer via the flexible benefits scheme during 2011 which will lead to even further levels of engagement from employees.
Crawley Borough Council
One organisation that successfully involved its employees in the development an implementation of its employee benefits is Crawley Borough Council. The local authority chose to engage its working parents in the development of specific benefits to support them.
The council implemented a series of participative communication initiatives aimed at working parents, including staff forums and other information sessions relating to work life balance and the provision of childcare vouchers. However it found that encouraging people to attend was more difficult than it anticipated – partly because the working parents were (unsurprisingly busy working) So setting aside time for them to attend a staff forum or information meeting was a problem.
To tackle this, we held a series of drop-in sessions, enabling individual employees to pop by whenever suited them during their working day to talk to one of our benefits consultants. The sessions were concise and feedback was encouraged, with staff suggestions incorporated into future presentations. For people unable to make the sessions, details were published online.
Sarah Barnes, HR policy and equalities manager at Crawley Borough Council, explained “Given that time is an issue, employees were also given reading material in a variety of formats from booklets to pdfs, as well as updates at monthly team briefing meetings.”
Finally, the council also provides an annual statement of benefits, complete with information about new or existing benefits available such as cycle to work schemes.
Be compelling
Benefits and motivation schemes have no impact if the advantages are not communicated and the target audience does not take them up. Organisations have to make their programmes compelling enough for people to want to be involved and to implement new, creative methods to encourage them to engage with and understand the programme.
Such schemes benefit both the recipients and the organisation, generating positive feeling and increased engagement which, in turn, leads to improved productivity and impacts on the bottom line.
See also Paul Ashcroft’s ‘Reward choices’ in The People Bulletin, 27 August 2009.