Client
FMCG with a small Head Office population and a large manufacturing and logistics division and traditional family values with a strong “people first” culture.
Solution
- Reviewed existing benefit strategy and recommended a clearly defined strategy with reward principles aligned to existing company culture
- Benefits matrix against all employee levels to help understand fairness
- Employee insight on understanding, engagement and value of existing benefits, including ideation for future benefits
- Benefits review to help them understand current market competitive position, including detailed health benefits review
- Review of potential benefit online systems/flexible benefit platforms to ease the administrative burden and provide greater transparency
- Levelling framework against which to pin the benefits provision to improve fairness and consistency
Challenge
- Concerns around complexity for benefit eligibility
- Escalating benefits costs
- Balancing a culture of caring and supportive benefits against rising costs and increasing employee expectations
- Identify and resolve any risks around fairness and equity
- Administrative and resource burden
Impact
- Clearly defined benefit strategy and principles aligned to the company culture and values
- Understood employee benefit satisfaction and market competitiveness of the existing benefit package.
- Improvements roadmap for benefits to ensure the organisation could attract and retain top talent.
"Feedback from the Exec was positive and we have clear direction on what we need to do going forward."
Context
The Reward strategy was built on traditional family values with a strong "people first" culture. Benefits provided support and care to employees and were described as traditional.
The Problem
- Culture of providing caring, supportive benefits, with no clear benefit strategy for future development.
- Complex eligibility criteria and potential anomalies.
- Escalating benefits costs, and need to balance culture against rising costs while getting better return on investment.
- Little insight or understanding of how satisfied their employees were with the benefit offering or what the employee valued most.
- Desire to drive overall employee engagement.
- Benefits maintained manually by 2 members of the Reward team with no capacity to review the longer-term benefit strategy, design and development.
Which meant:
- Risks around fairness and consistency in provision of benefits
- Risks around affordability of benefit costs and increasing pressure on return on investment
- Risk of reactive/tactical decision making rather than strategic decisions due to resource burden
- Potential risk that existing benefits whilst fitting with the employee culture and values were not necessarily market competitive and driving employee engagement and satisfaction.
- High admin burden
The Tension
Organisational culture of providing supportive and caring benefits as part of “family values” without any longer-term employee benefit strategy or roadmap.
Complex eligibility criteria for benefits risking consistency, fairness, understanding and engagement.
Affordability v providing best employee experience.
HR wished to provide a more proactive forward-thinking approach to benefits but were burdened with day-to-day admin and support.
What Reward Heads did
- Diagnosed where the benefits approach didn't align with the culture and values and recommended an updated benefit strategy and set of benefit principles,
- Analysed fairness and consistency through a matrix of all benefits with an overlay of all the different employee levels and segments within the organisation, to identify opportunities to simplify, make cost savings and ensure fairness and consistency.
- Completed an in-depth review of the benefit offering against benchmark data to ensure a clear understanding of current market competitiveness and identified areas for improvement.
- Redesigned the healthcare benefit offering to align with their culture and needs to provide greater focus on employee health and wellbeing.
- Implemented a benefit development roadmap with high level costings for approval by the Exec team, prepared a summary of benefit areas with key messaging for simpler communication to drive greater awareness and engagement and identified quick win opportunities to improve employee satisfaction.
Business Impact
- The Business was able to provide enhancements to benefits at no extra cost.
- By better communicating benefits they were able to drive greater understanding and engagement.
- HR were able to reduce the admin burden to focus on a more proactive approach to benefits.
People Impact
- Employees had a stronger focus on their personal health and wellbeing, whilst maintaining an overall benefit package aligned to company culture and values.
- Managers and Leaders where better able to explain and justify benefits and support employees.
Which resulted in …
Leadership now reassured that the benefit package is market competitive and are able to explain benefits and eligibility more confidently to their employees.
Reward is now more easily understood across the business, fairer and more consistent and is valued more by employees.
If this feels familiar …
Clients often come to us saying they need to improve or redesign their benefits and regularly have significant concerns about benefit costs. By gaining a clear understanding of the company culture and values, helping define their benefit strategy and benefit design, taking time to understand the benefit eligibility and take up rates, along with any employee insight, we can find cost effective and often cost neutral solutions to improving the overall employee benefit experience.
