Optimising Your Employee Benefits Platform

Making your people feel valued

In a world where it only takes a couple of clicks to start looking for a new job, it’s vitally important to maximise your workforce’s engagement, loyalty and sense of being valued.

Worried about employee turnover?

More than ever, employees are aware — in the wake of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis — that they can seek out alternative employment on terms that suit them better. In making these kinds of choices, they will weigh their current benefits against those that they think can be gleaned elsewhere.

Is your employee benefits system up to the job?

This is where the quality of your employee benefits platform comes into play. If people are not able to gain simple access to clear information about their company’s benefits, they might well undervalue what they’re being offered and opt to go elsewhere. Similarly, a longer-term lack of interaction with the benefits platform — for example, if it’s overly bureaucratic or difficult to use — could contribute to the ‘normalisation’ of disengagement and make people lose sight of the benefits to which they’re entitled.

Accessibility, flexibility, relevance

One way to assist with this is to ensure that your company’s employee benefits platform is as well-optimised for your particular circumstances as possible, such that employees always have quick, easy access to all the information about their benefits entitlement.

Anything you can do to simplify and streamline the people experience in terms of benefits administration and access is going to help. Amid competing tasks, the last thing employees want to do is jump through bureaucratic hoops to get at the information they’re after.

Equally important is that the system is flexible enough to be tailored to different employee needs. The deferential era of one-size-fits-all is long gone, and employees expect to be treated as individuals in all contexts. They want to be able to access the information that’s relevant to them fast.

Psychological benefits of employee benefits technology

The quality of your benefits platform can also influence the people’s experiences in ways that contribute to employees’ productivity more generally. Financial/mental health offerings — when clearly communicated and utilised — can provide the kind of reassurance and security that help make people feel valued, happy and engaged.

Finding a way through the maze

So how do you pick the right platform for your organisation? There are plenty of platforms on offer, each with their own strengths and drawbacks, and this richness of options can make it difficult to be confident that you’ve got the best solution in place.

If you’re not entirely happy with the employee benefits platform you currently have deployed, then you’re far from alone. Almost 80% of our survey respondents said they were looking for improvements of some kind over their current benefits technology platform.

Boosting engagement by finding the right platform

The challenge of matching an organisation’s needs to the right employee benefits admin system is widespread, as is the challenge of stimulating an appropriate level of employee engagement with the platform. A Gallagher survey found that more than half of organisations (56.25%) say that employees are ‘not engaged’ with their company’s benefits technology platforms.

Unsurprisingly, employers are taking action to remedy this, with almost half of our survey respondents (47.37%) looking to review their current benefits platform in the next 12 months.

What organisations are looking for

The companies we surveyed cited a number of reasons for wanting to change their platform:

• Over half (56.05%) spoke about a desire to increase their employees’ engagement with the organisation’s benefits offering
• Almost a fifth (18.68%) said they were looking for better administration and reporting

Overall, this indicates that around four-fifths of our respondents have significant misgivings about their current systems, casting considerable doubt on the efficacy/fit of many of the marketplace’s established benefits support platforms.

So, how might you focus on identifying your next employee benefits software choice to ensure that it’s the best fit?

What should your employee benefits platform do?

One way to think about the challenge is to identify a set of criteria/functions that will best allow you to satisfy the twin requirements of (i) boosting employee engagement with the system and (ii) optimising its cost-effectiveness.

What’s next for your employee benefits technology?

Some UK businesses have the right benefits technology platform in place for their people, but our survey results make it clear that, for many organisations, there is a significant shortfall.

This high level of reported dissatisfaction with existing employee benefit management systems suggests that many established platforms are not doing the job that companies want them to do, resulting in the risk of reduced employee engagement, a higher risk of retention problems, and wasted expenditure.

At Gallagher, we have a solution for the benefits support platform challenge: Gallagher Guide, our integrated solutions for benefits technology and people experience consulting. Gallagher Guide provides intuitive employee self-service for your HR teams, full visibility on benefits usage via a back-end portal, and flexible administration models to suit you and your team:

• Comprehensive employee benefits administration: A scalable solution to support your delivery model, combined with a full reporting suite aligned to your requirements.
• Insightful analytics at your fingertips: People analytics, together with actionable insights, on both a local and global scale.
• An engaging user experience for your people: A personalised, integrated, device-responsive dashboard to help employees make the right choices, elevating your employer value proposition, all delivered through a user-friendly experience.

To find out more about what Gallagher Guide can offer you or for help in tailoring your benefits strategies, contact our experienced employee benefit & reward consultants for further information.