Employee surveys
Employee surveys are a good way to determine which employee benefits to provide in the first place. If you know what your employees' priorities and needs are, then you can match them with the employee benefits that will be most useful - your employee benefits provider can help with this too.
Internal communications
Communicating with your employees about their employee benefits platform offerings is vital to them understanding what schemes are available and to feel empowered to use them. There are a lot of options here that you can choose from depending on the type of message you want to send out.
Ask your employee benefits provider what they have in terms of marketing materials that could help keep your employee informed about what’s available. For our employee benefits, we provide handouts and employer factsheets to give you this information and allow you to relay it to your employees.
Posters
A great way to catch your employees’ attention when they’re at work is through posters. You can put them up around your work premises, attach them to emails or host them online. Switching them out for new ones occasionally is advised as it can help to keep people engaged with them. It also gives you the opportunity to promote your employee benefits at times of the year that seem appropriate. For example, if you run a MotorSave scheme then it could be useful to include messages about getting your vehicle ready for winter.
Emails
Emails are another way to help support your employees in understanding and using their employee benefits. As they’re sent digitally there’s also the opportunity for you to add important links to your employee benefits platform directly.
We provide email templates that can help you to promote schemes at different points, including scheme window reminders and email reminders about the great benefits that your employees have access to. These are useful as they can be accessed at a time that is convenient to the employee and changed to fit the message you’re trying to get across.
Read our case study to see how we helped Blenheim Palace create an employee benefits platform that was engaging and familiar to their wide range of employee roles.
Mobile app
Implementing a mobile app can help your employees to make the most of their employee benefits whilst on the go. This will cut down on them having to sign onto the platform through a desktop and go through longer navigation, so they can easily use their employee benefits whilst out and about.
Branding
Your company’s branding is a big way in which your company will see something as part of the company rather than something from an outside provider that they have no connection with. This will give them a sense of familiarity with their employee benefits and make it more likely that they will engage with them.
Scheme review
The employee surveys can be used again at further points so that you can keep an eye on what your employee's priorities are. You could change the survey to ask other questions like ‘Do you find your employee benefits easy to use?’ and ‘How would you say you most use your employee benefits?’ - this can help you to figure out any opportunities to improve your employee benefits engagement.
If your employees’ needs seem to be changing, you can add new benefits to support them and remove benefits that don’t seem to provide value to your employees. This way you can be sure that your employee benefits platform will have consistent engagement.
Another option is to reopen the application window for benefits that were previously popular for your employees, or to see if there’s popular ones you can keep open year-round. This will mean that your employees can access as and when they need, rather than just when the scheme is open the first time. Regular application windows will allow employees to make consistent use of the schemes.
Host employee benefits events
Sometimes it may not be that the employee benefits you provide aren’t useful to your employees, it may just be that they need a refresher on what’s available, whether through a webinar or an in-person event. If you recruit new employees, they may also not be as aware as employees that were working for you when your benefits first launched.
To help educate and engage your employees, you can run events that are designed to help remind your employees about what’s available to them. This may seem like it’s a lot of work but running your employee benefits with a supplier will make this easier as they can help you to organise an event for your employees that gives them the information they need to use their employee benefits to the full advantage.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why you may see a dip or increase in engagement of your employee benefits platform but we hope that this article helps to give you some ideas on how you can ensure consistent engagement with your employee benefits platform.