Ensuring your workforce is happy, healthy and motivated has become a complicated and expensive matter. Multiple generations, diverse workers, hybrid working all means delivering a coherent benefits offering that is useful and accessible is a serious challenge. After you’ve assembled and paid for a seemingly unending array of benefits you may find some of them are still not used – or more to the point, unless you manage the scheme correctly you might not even know some of them are not used – the result? Money wasted and no impact on the workforce.
The HR World’s second webinar for May took as its theme Employee Benefits. Under the title: How to stop Wasting Money the webinar featured input from Wendy Rose, Global Sales/Partnerships Director at Dialogue, Philomena Gray, Global Chief People Officer at Imagination and Mary Beighton, People & Culture Director at Zuto.
One overwhelming takeaway from the webinar was that organisations should be very clear as to what they want to achieve from their employee benefits. These are not simply provided in order to reward good work, but can be crucial for employee engagement and even creating an appreciated company culture. At a time when the cost-of-living crisis has placed huge emphasis on the need to reward and recognise employees, taking a strategic approach to employee benefits can work wonders.
The panellists identified various benefits to be effective in appealing to talent both from a candidate attraction point of view and in terms of retaining that talent. They also set out the way by which employers can ensure their benefits are always delivering great value for money, encouraging them to carry out a regular review of provision based on employee use and of course, employee preference.
At the end of the day, employee benefits should not be taken for granted, either by the employers offering these perks and rewards, nor by the employees in line to receive them. By making these an active and evolving offering, organisations can maximise the value driven from each benefit and ensure the organisation and the employee gets the best from their working life.
