Success story: Via East Midlands
Access is always proud to work with organisations that effectively balance progress with responsible sustainability in the community. We were delighted when VIA East Midlands chose us to enhance their employee benefits offering with Access Engage (formally Caboodle), achieving savings of over £190,000 in salary and NI through their salary sacrifice schemes.
We spoke to Head of HR Business Partnering, Melanie Adams, about working with Access and the outcomes we’ve helped them to deliver.
About VIA East Midlands
VIA East Midlands specialises in highways and infrastructure services. With around 700 employees, VIA East Midlands works closely with local authorities to deliver essential maintenance, improvement, and construction projects that keep communities on the move.
By combining a public sector service ethos with a strong commercial focus, VIA East Midlands offers services to private and public sectors in the region, from conception to completion.
Why VIA East Midlands chose Access
Given the size of the organisation, managing employee perks and benefits had become increasingly complex, so the team sought a solution to simplify their employee benefits systems and automate processes, while adding flexibility and flair to their offering.
Melanie told us, “Our HR team wanted to provide a comprehensive rewards and benefits package, ensuring employees were motivated, engaged, and recognised for their hard work”.
Access Engage quickly proved itself the front-runner as a centralised, user-friendly solution that streamlined administration while providing a range of benefits to suit the diverse preferences of the VIA East Midlands team.
With Access Engage, employees can benefit from:
- Financial wellbeing, including income protection, critical illness cover, and life assurance
- Salary sacrifice, including childcare vouchers, holiday trading, and car leasing
- Lifestyle and discounts, including supermarkets, cinemas, and holidays
- Health and wellbeing, including gym memberships, occupational health, and eyecare
- Workplace and commuting, including commuting loans, car sharing, and bike-to-work
Your challenge, our solution
We asked Melanie about the main objectives in investing in a new employee benefits solution, which were to:
- Improve employee engagement and satisfaction through a more tailored and accessible benefits offering
- Streamline administration to free up valuable time for the HR team
- Enhance cost efficiency, particularly through opportunities like reducing National Insurance Contributions (NICs)
- Support recruitment and retention by positioning VIA East Midlands as an employer of choice in the sector
Post-implementation VIA East Midlands can now offer all their existing and new employees benefits on one platform, to provide:
- Improved engagement, giving employees greater control with flexible benefits
- Set scheme rules and eligibility for different employee cohorts
- Scheme marketing for effortless and consistent engagement
- An employee benefits app for instant access to discounts in-store or online
- Branding, including company logo
- Dedicated helpdesk support
- Comprehensive employee benefits, HR and Payroll, all in one place
- Simple employee benefits to fully bespoke and highly technical solutions
Melanie added, “Our experience with Access Engage has been extremely positive and it’s significantly reduced the administrative burden on our team. Customer support is proactive and responsive, making it really easy to resolve queries and implement new features. The rollout process was smooth, and our employees quickly adapted to it.”
Benefits and impact
We’re delighted that Access has been able to deliver such significant and meaningful results for the organisation. We asked Melanie to elaborate on the outcomes VIA East Midlands has found most impactful, and she told us:
- Over £190,000 of NIC savings, through salary sacrifice offerings such holiday trading & bike-to-work scheme
- Customisable rewards: We’ve got the flexibility to tailor our rewards to our employees’ diverse needs and preferences
- Automated processes: We’ve got significantly less manual admin
She added, “To give you a working example, at Christmas we were able to give personalised gift cards to all our employees and it was seamless. Everyone received recognition of their work, and the feedback was really positive. Many of our employees sent notes of appreciation that their contribution to the business had been recognised.”
Before you go…
Finally, we asked Melanie if she had any advice, she’d like to share with organisations looking to implement a new employee benefits solution. “I would definitely recommend Access Engage. It’s an excellent solution for organisations looking to streamline their rewards strategy while boosting employee satisfaction and engagement”.
We hope this customer success story has given you plenty to think about. If you’d like to explore what we could achieve together, please get in touch. Our experts are always on-hand to talk with you.
Every solution, in one place, for your people
The Access Group's HCM division, Access People, offer an unrivalled suite of solutions for businesses, including HR and Payroll, Absence Management, Workforce Management, Compliance, Recruitment, Talent, Learning, Employee Benefits and Engagement, Health & Safety, all of which are underpinned by the powerful Access Workspace platform.
The Access Group is one of the leading providers of business management software to small and mid-sized organisations in the UK, Ireland, and Asia Pacific. We help over 100,000 customers across commercial and not-for-profit sectors become more productive and efficient.