Five ways to drive engagement with your employee benefits in 2021

As an employer, your benefits are likely to be one of the biggest non-salary costs for your business. Before embarking on any campaign to drive engagement, it’s always worth taking a step back and conducting a holistic review to make sure your benefits are delivering value for your business and importantly, your people.

Once you’ve conducted your review, and made any changes to your benefits package, you’ll then be perfectly placed to start your engagement project in the knowledge that your benefits are aligned to the needs of your people. Here are five ways to drive engagement and boost productivity with your employee benefits in 2021:

1. Plan a 12-month engagement strategy

Everything works better with a plan. Setting out a 12-month engagement strategy with key events throughout the year is a great way to keep engagement levels up with your benefits. It also presents the perfect opportunity to engage with your people if you know you have something coming up in the calendar.

Think about the time of year and how different benefits might be appropriate. For example, with Christmas only a few months away, you might want to advertise more finance-based benefits to help people save some money during times when money might be tight.

2. Make your benefits more accessible

We live in a world where we can get anything at the touch of a button and your benefits should be no different. From the way your people learn about the benefits available to them, to the way that they select them, the process should be as simple as possible. This is where a mobile-first employee benefits platform can really drive accessibility and engagement. It can also be a great place to build your benefits brand.

3. Focus on education, not just communication

Offering benefits education is a really important step in driving the value of your employee benefits. When your people fully understand the benefits on offer to them, there’s a greater chance they will engage with the benefit and get more out of it. Hosting a series of regular sessions throughout the year to improve understanding of how benefits help your people in their daily lives can be a really powerful tactic.

One way to deliver these sessions could be short videos. This can help make your content and methods of delivery varied and constantly available.

4. Use data to drive your engagement strategy

You have access to a wide range of data in your HR systems that you can use to ‘nudge’ people towards your benefits programme. Think about how you can use this data to build personalised communications and make what you share relevant to those who need it when it matters most.

For example, if somebody has recently returned from maternity/paternity leave, they may be interested in adding their new family member to their Private Medical Insurance policy.

5. Review your progress regularly

As with any strategy, it is important you review how effective it has been on a regular basis. If you have a benefits platform, you will have access to all of this data in one place. If not, the data will still be there, but you may need some help from your consultants to get it all into one accessible place.

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