4 common problems with employee benefits engagement and how to solve them

Why is employee benefits engagement important?

Your employee benefits can be a huge source of support for your employees and help you to tackle some of the issues that impact productivity, such as poor mental health or financial, for example.

When used alongside other resources, like financial wellbeing eLearning or access to financial advice and support, your employee benefits can be useful in supporting your employees overcome some of these barriers. This in turn can help increase your company’s overall engagement and productivity levels. 

Benefits engagement is likely to be generally better if you have good engagement levels with HR software that has self-service functionality and mobile apps. Good employee engagement can improve other metrics like employee satisfaction and helps support your organisation in achieving its KPIs.

However, any issues employees may have with accessing your employee benefits may prevent them from getting as much out of them as possible. So, it’s important to solve any issues as quickly and robustly as you can.

The four main issues with employee benefits engagement:

1. Lack of understanding of employee benefits

Your employees are unlikely to engage with employee benefits if they don’t understand what’s available to them.  

If you have an extensive employee benefits offering, then there'll be a lot of things for your employees to wrap their heads around, both with employee benefits in general and then when it comes to the specifics of each individual schemes.  

Some employee benefits schemes can be quite complicated and especially when it comes to parting ways with money, this can put employees off from utilising schemes. Employees need to be able to understand: 

• What they’re signing up for 
• How it will benefit them
• What is the cost to them (if there is any)  

Making it as clear as possible what’s available to employees and how they can use their employee benefits can help ensure they’re able to use what’s available to them, increasing employee benefits engagement.  

Continuing the communication once schemes are already set is also important as it helps to ensure that employees are able to keep utilising what’s available to them, and that there are no drops in employee benefits engagement. 

There may be certain aspects of your employee benefits that changes over time, and it’s important that employees are kept up to date with these. If they see a difference in the product they receive or the amount it costs them, they could disengage if they don’t see the value anymore.  

For example, salary sacrifice schemes result in tax and national insurance savings from the employee’s gross salary. If national insurance rates change then this will change the amount saved monthly, so it’s important that these kinds of changes are communicated with your employees as soon as possible to stop them from disengaging. 

2. Ensuring employee benefits are relevant to employees  

Employees are more likely to engage with employee benefits if they are able to clearly identify how they relate to them.  

Employee benefits can be looked at in many ways, including proactive and reactive. Proactive benefits help employees stop a problem from occurring, while reactive benefits help employees tackle a problem that has already occurred.  

If it’s not clear how a scheme can help employees solve a problem or prevent a problem, then it could be more difficult to encourage them to engage with their available schemes.  

Try to be open minded about which employees might use a particular scheme and promote your employee benefits to as many people as possible. This way, employees can decide how they utilise the benefits available to them. 

3. Communicating the value of employee benefits to employees 

Some employee benefits such as voluntary benefits require employees to contribute themselves financially to see the rewards. 

In some cases, employee benefits such as Private Medical Insurance (PMI) may only be part funded by the employer, requiring the employee to make up the rest. 

To improve employee benefits engagement, employees must see the value in the benefits available to them, especially where they have to contribute themselves to realise that benefit. 

In some cases, it’s about demonstrating the clear financial and value gain employees get from using their benefits compared to if they sought the same thing elsewhere. 

For example, using a comparison table to show how your Car Benefit scheme is more cost-effective or more convenient than getting a high street PCP deal for the employee. 

In some cases, employers invest in an extensive range of highly sought after employee benefits but simply don’t communicate the value at all to employees, leaving a lot on the table. 

For example, offering fully-funded PMI to employees is a highly valuable employee benefit to the employee, so communicating this value is essential. 

Employees also need to not only understand the value of their benefits but realise that value by using the scheme too. 

Overcoming this challenge is easier said than done, but using things like comparison tables, employee testimonials, use cases, workshops, and incentives for logging on and using employee benefits can all help overcome this barrier to employee benefits engagement. 

It’s worth bearing in mind too that once an employee uses a scheme once, often they’re more likely to use it again.

4. Providing a consumer-grade user experience  

The experience your employees have with their employee benefits will determine how they feel about their employee benefits and how often they use them.  

If you offer your employee benefits through a provider they’ll likely take care of the UX to ensure your employees have the best experience possible with the platform.   

A positive of housing your employee benefits on a platform is that everything is in one place, which in itself helps improve the user experience with your employee benefits.  

Another consideration your provider will make is the different devices your employees may want to access their employee benefits on. You ideally want all employees to have the same experience with their employee benefits regardless of which device they use.  

Amongst your employees, you may have employees with a range of disabilities. This can change the way that they need to access technology and therefore will add extra needs when it comes to accessing their employee benefits.  

Working with your employee benefits provider to make adaptions is important to help make sure that employees can use the benefits available to them. However, if you use the right technology then it shouldn’t be extra work as the options should be available.  

Some of the adaptations available include bigger text, colour changing of text and text to speech programmes. All of these can help support employees with a range of disabilities.  

Another thing to keep in mind is how many pages people have to access. Your employees may have disabilities where the longer they use technology, the more it causes pain. They may also have a disability that affects their information processing, so the least amount of information they have to take in and the least number of pages they have to navigate through, the better.  

Finally, it’s important to check on the functional aspect of your employee benefits. It’s useful to regularly access your employee benefits and check: 

• Can employees' access what’s available to them? 
• Are there any broken pages or issues that need fixing? 
• Do they have all the information that they need? 
• Does every page have accessibility features? 

Overcoming barriers to employee benefits engagement is easier said than done. 

For more expert advice on how to get the most from your employee benefits, get in touch and we’ll run through what a highly engaging, highly valuable employee benefits platform and package could look like for your business.