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The Matrix to Design Employee Benefits for 2024
The latest research shows that 75% of companies don’t offer specific employee benefits in line with their different workforce demographics, despite 61% of employers stating that they receive active requests from their teams for wellbeing support relating to demographics such as gender and age. With statistics predicting that UK employers are losing up to £15bn per year from unused benefits that don’t resonate with the needs of their workforce, it’s time for new approaches.
So, why do so many employee benefits go under-utilised, and how can employers bridge this gap? Let’s explore the design and delivery behind a competitive employee benefits offer.
The Importance of Employee Benefits Design
The current landscape presents a bleak outlook. Employees continue to navigate a challenging climate whilst businesses face an increasingly competitive market, causing the gap between talent’s needs and what employers are bringing to the table to only widen further. So, what are the main barriers behind this disparity that businesses need to address to maximise their ROI from their benefits package?
Wellbeing gaps
The role of benefits in meaningfully supporting employee wellbeing in- and outside of the workplace needs has become increasingly important – teams now view their benefits package as a fundamental means to support each pillar of their wellbeing. And this continues to climb candidates’ and employees’ agendas, with 66% believing their benefits package holds equal or more importance to their salary, and 75% say they’re more likely to stay within their organisation due to the perks available to them. However, many employers are missing a trick by overlooking the power of employee benefits in delivering on their wellbeing strategy.
Lack of personalisation
Another all-too-common barrier behind modern employee benefits designs is a lack of personalisation that reflects the unique needs of the workforce. Today, just 18% of employees believe their employer fully understands their needs – leading to global satisfaction with benefits to stand at its lowest in 10 years. This is due to many businesses undertaking blanket, tick-box approaches that don’t address the unique and evolving needs of their teams.. Every business is brilliantly unique, with a diverse breadth of needs spanning multi-generational workforces. As a result, unfortunately there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for employers to deliver – every organisation needs to invest in first understanding what their people need and then meaningfully reflect this in their benefits package. Otherwise, benefits investment risks poor return, perks gather dust and businesses damage their employer brand in an already competitive market.
Poor accessibility
As the working world continues to evolve, employers need to evolve their People processes with it. Changed ways of working mean teams are now increasingly dispersed, and as a result, are at heightened risk of becoming disconnected and disengaged unless modernised approaches are put in place. One of the major barriers behind under-utilised benefits is poor accessibility, where often only corporate teams can reach their perks stored in disparate places across the company’s shared drive. Particularly for teams working remotely or for frontline workforces, this presents a key challenge – just 10% feel they have access to the right technology tools to keep them connected and empowered at work. Importantly, benefits need to be available around the clock and outside of working hours to ensure engagement and adoption is optimised.
How to Personalise Your Employee Benefits Design in 5 Steps
So, to help employers navigate their benefits strategy and define an offer that’s right for their people, we came up with Rippl’s Benefits Matrix. This provides a framework for businesses of all sizes and industries to design, deliver and deploy a competitive package that’s personalised to the unique needs of their workforce. Let’s take a look at what this can include.
Step 1: Understand your benefits goals.
Before diving into selecting your perks, it’s first important to understand the key objectives behind designing the benefits offer. Is this to demonstrate and improve your commitment to team wellbeing? Will this support in sharpening your employer brand across planned new hires? Will the offer enhance satisfaction and retention across at-risk teams? The objective should align with your overall cost investment in benefits, which should also determine the difference between ‘must-have’ and ‘nice-to-have’ perks. This objective then becomes your key metric to track improvements against as your strategy rolls out.
Step 2: Assess your workforce needs.
Commonly, businesses build their employee benefits design around what they assume their people want and need. But as we’ve already covered, each organisation is unique and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. To ensure your benefits offer achieves its key objective, you need to first understand what employees are seeking from their perks. This ensures the overall package is exclusively tailored to the workforce, employees feel their voice is heard and investment isn’t wasted on benefits that aren’t relevant to them. By introducing a benefits feedback framework, employers can set regular opportunities for establishing what teams need and identify opportunities for improvement over time.
Step 3: Explore your competition.
Especially when focusing on talent attraction and retention, it’s important to understand the benefits packages offered by competitors. This not only ensures your offer falls in line with other key players in your market, but identifies any trending or emerging perks employers need to have on their radar. Plus, this presents a key opportunity to differentiate your brand by offering a fresh and competitive take on competitors’ offers.
Step 4: Determine the fit and function of your perks.
A competitive employee benefits design will encompass a broad spectrum of perks that tick a dynamic list of boxes. It’s important to determine and assess the right balance for your business. When shortlisting your benefits offer, consider the desirability of each perk, the demographic fit within your workforce, the wellbeing pillar this addresses and rank its business priority. This assessment will provide a clear picture of how diverse your offer is and identify any gaps to ensure your perks are fit for purpose.
Step 5: Track engagement and success.
It’s fundamental to understand how to evidence investment from your benefits strategy. Success metrics should closely represent your overall strategy objectives, and should focus on both short- and long-term goals. Some examples can include employee engagement with perks, savings from discounts and offers, improvement in feedback and satisfaction with benefits, through to enhanced wider strategic goals such as engagement, productivity, absenteeism and retention. To understand the overall performance, live data insights into each of these metrics will be key for evidencing how the benefits offer is supporting not only your People goals but wider business objectives.
Find Your Benefits Matrix for 2024
Ready to get started? We’ve got you covered. Rippl’s Employee Benefits Matrix enables you to cover each of these 5 areas and build a personalised strategy that your business and its people can capitalise on. Effective programmes centre around how and why businesses can meaningfully support their teams to be their best – and this looks different in each organisation.
ULTIMATE GUIDE TO EMPLOYEE BENEFITS
Your 4-Step Benefits Matrix
In our Ultimate Guide to Employee Benefits, use the 4-step Matrix to:
- Provide a feedback framework to understand the diversity of needs across the workforce through employee ideation routes and market research ideas, with helpful prompts to get the ball rolling.
- Outline a bespoke and tiered package scored on strategic objectives specific to the organisation including the wellbeing focus, target demographic, industry desirability and business urgency of each perk.
- Establish the success measures for the package as a whole to evidence both short- and long-term impact.
- Identify the features and capabilities of a best-fit benefits programme to deliver success.
FAQs on Employee Benefits Design
There is no defined ‘standard’ employee benefits package in the UK, as businesses are so different. There are some benefits more commonly adopted than others, however, engagement and success of each benefit will depend on their relevancy and fit for each workforce. A good place to start with your offer is to define a ‘set minimum’ of perks which encompass different areas of employee wellbeing.
Investment in employee benefits will completely depend on the organisation and budget available. Similarly, each perk will differ in cost per employee to deliver. This is why it’s so crucial to ensure the perks you invest in are sought after by employees, so spend is maximised by engagement and uptake.
Using an employee benefits platform by nature allows for transparency around how your workforce is engaging with and using their perks on offer. This can include which benefits are most popular in terms of views, interactions and purchases, leading to insights around employee savings and adoption.
We host your employee benefits in a dedicated hub within our customers’ platforms, which can be accessed around the clock via the desktop or mobile app. When building your benefits, we can streamline your existing perks into your hub, and tailor additional benefits from our catalogue into this at any time. Employees can then take advantage of their offer whenever they need, wherever they are. Our internal benefits experts also work closely with our customers to regularly review and optimise their benefits to ensure their offer remains ahead of the curve.
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