The world is in turmoil, and everybody is feeling the pinch. This also affects employers when it comes to meeting the diverse and changing needs of their workforce.
According to Deloitte, 79% of CFO's said their companies plan to embed more automation and digital transformation into operations as they manage higher costs and concerns about the economy.
For organizations with a distributed global workforce finding and retaining talent and engaging employees - remote or hybrid, desk-based or working across various locations and offices is always quite a task. With employee well-being and flexibility identified as the two main areas to focus on 2023, they must also ensure to get value for money from their benefit programs. They also need to meet the employees' ever-changing expectations & needs instead of spending valuable time manually preparing annual total reward statements, answering questions from employees due to a lack of clear online information, and preparing monthly enrollment reports.
The outdated one-size-fits-all approach in recognizing employee is not enough anymore. Employees necessitate a personalized, tailor-made and digital first experience with access to real-time information. Today, HR tech and the data it provides are critical in personalizing your employees experience when accessing, enrolling and utilizing benefits.
Here are three ways that HR tech and data can help personalize benefits:
1. Everything in one place, accessible anytime.
For employers, especially with a global workforce, the administration and the individualization of benefits are only possible to manage with SaaS platforms.
Employee benefit platforms streamline and automate processes, ensuring better data governance and benefits and reward costs management. It minimizes the admin in, for example, the employee lifecycle by simplifying preboarding, onboarding, and offboarding, facilitated with checklists and training videos added for them to complete themselves. This also enables the companies to tailor benefits to the employees' individual needs for them to enroll online.
Did you know employees frequently leave a company because they lack insight into the compensation and benefits available to them?
The cure for that is giving employees a unique and digitized user experience customized based on their profile. They can view everything from their total reward statements, read communications explicitly aimed at them, select benefits based on their needs and enroll directly through the platform - anytime, via any device they prefer.
2. Timely and relevant information in their hands
A good Employee benefits platform comes with a communication engine - an excellent platform also provides a mobile app with the same functionality as the web-based platform.
Are you aware that over 61% of the world's population uses smartphones to read emails and browse today? According to Statista, there will be around 6.8 billion smartphones in use in 2023, estimated to be approximately 7.7 billion, if not more, in 2027.
With a communication engine and a mobile app, you can reach your entire workforce by sending your messages through the right channel to any device, anywhere and anytime.
With the help of different eligibility filters, your content can be sent to specific individuals, groups, departments, and countries. You can even automate the delivery of announcements, reminders, and invitations during particular life events, such as work anniversaries or a change in benefits available to encourage enrollment.
With an app, you can reach your employees anywhere, anytime, with all the web-based platform functionality. Mobile access allows employees to manage their benefits and even answer company surveys on the go, improving the overall employee experience.
3. Make informed decisions
By leveraging HR tech, companies can access and analyze information about their employees’ benefits usage to better understand what benefits are being used and which ones aren’t. This information is vital and the foundation for designing personalized benefits packages that meet the individual needs of employees and reduce wasted spend on benefits with no uptake.
Recently, AON shared some tips on how the optimization of strategic benefits offering can support during rising costs of inflation:
• ensure fees and expenses are in line with market rates
• eliminate duplicate coverage
• review benefits regularly to ensure they are at market levels
• review utilization of benefits to provide value
Gathering costs and reviewing uptake is quite challenging using manual processes such as excel instead of a digital system, but showing ROI to your stakeholders? Measuring uptake against company goals and objectives? Engagement to support retention? Imagine doing this globally across 50 different markets; it's simply impossible.
By deploying a digital system for employee benefits, you gain a single source of real-time data for your global benefits programs, capturing the core data such as cost allocation, demographic usage and overall uptake, and how your employees engage with the benefits offered. Enabling you to be a forward-thinking, attractive employer with the ability to be agile and effective as standard with your rewards and benefits strategy.
If you're looking for ways to improve employee experience and utilize a strategic rewards and benefits experience to support employees during the Cost of Living Crisis, we've got a quick step guide to start supporting employees today. Access the guide below. 