Building a flexible employee benefits platform that supports diversity
You know about diversity in your workplace. And, working in HR, you also know that your employees are people, each with needs and lives outside of the office. Days of basic employee benefits that no one uses, or know how to access, are firmly in the past. You want flexible benefits that reflect the real people.
In today’s climate especially, we know the importance of looking after the mental, physical, and financial health of our teams. We know that each of these elements impact one another. And it’s not a one-size fits all solution.
What young, single, and childless employees want, compared to parents, compared to those preparing to retirement, might all look quite different. On top of that, accessibility plays a role in the success of your employee benefits portal. Not everyone will have a company email address, or even work in an office division.
So, how do we recommend you approach choosing the right flexible employee benefits platform, keeping employee diversity in mind? You need:
#1 Location diversity: a secure, easy to access for all employees. Wherever they are
We know that not all employees are office based. And even those who work at a computer, could be working from home or in the field.
Second to location parameters, some elements of benefits might feel sensitive, such as utilising private healthcare, employee assistance programmes, or financial resources.
So, it’s really important to make sure your benefits portal is accessible from outside of your company’s internal internet or even an intranet.
#2 A platform that’s looks like and sounds like your company
Having a platform that’s personalised to your company may seem like an “extra” but research has proven that aligning your internal communications and branding helps retain talent. Second to that, absences decrease, and has a positive impact on commitment and loyalty.
#3 Employee feedback!
It may seem obvious, but often gathering, digesting, and acting upon employee feedback gets overlooked. Sometimes it feels like hard work to create and distribute surveys, much less, make time to analyse the learnings.
Having a built-in survey tool with easy-to-understand dashboards can help take the hard work out. From here you can get to the heart of what matters most and drive positive change.
#4 Flexible benefits you can change
Above all, you need to make sure you have a platform centred around flexibility. For example, FlexGenius allows you to easily plug in benefits as and when they are available and disable those you no longer want. If your overarching employee feedback is that certain aspects of your offering are not aligning with your teams lifestyles, you might want to switch it for something more relevant. Or even making different levels of benefits available to employees of different seniorities.
#5 Help your employees understand what they have available
All our platforms feature a Total Reward Statement, showing your employees a breakdown of the value of their benefits. As a visual part of the app, it’s great for helping demonstrate things like their salary, pension contributions, company car or allowance, private healthcare and more.
#6 Tools that make life in HR and employee benefits easier!
And last but not least, you need to make sure that your portal is all singing and all dancing for you, as well as your employees. Survey tools. Email newsletters. Reporting. Flexibility to plugin new and existing benefits on the fly. We know that each and every one of these aspects helps make your job easier.
Our platforms
We have three best in class flexible employee benefits platforms: Flex Genius, PerkPal, and Benefit Select.
All of them feature the four essentials you need to create a truly engaging employee benefits solution for your teams. Each of them has a slightly different focus, making them ideal for different kinds of companies, and their requirements. Get in touch today if you’d like to discuss your needs and find out how we can help you retain and attract the best talent.
