EXCLUSIVE: Scottish Power has increased employee engagement with benefits after switching from online to paper-based total reward statements.
Since the launch of its paper statements in November 2014, 70% of the energy firm’s employees either strongly agreed or agreed that they appreciated the benefits offered by their employer.
More than 70% of Scottish Power’s employees also found something new in the paper-based statements, which are provided by Benefex, and 80% said they found the statements useful.
Gillian Thomson, reward manager at Scottish Power, said: “One of the issues we had with an online approach was that it did not reach all of our employees.
“We have many that are field-based who do not have access to the HR system. Employees had a lack of understanding and the value of the rewards and benefits.
“We have done a lot of work to build this knowledge and engagement, total reward statements has been a part of that.”
In order to boost engagement, the organisation issued three different designs incorporating different business-related images for differing working statements,
Feedback about the statements was collated via forms, which were attached to the paper total reward statements.
Thomson said: “The statements had to be designed so that they were something that reminded people who they worked for, it worked really well.
“It was vital the design was engaging and had information relating to how staff can join the pension scheme too.
“Total reward statements will be something we will do bi-annually and it is the start of our benefits journey to bring it all together in one place.
“With so much going on in the next 12 months it will be good to run statements again as benefits improve. This project was good to remind people that they do not just have a salary and it has been really valuable to put that in front of people.”
This is a great example of why the channel used to communicate with employees is so critical. Just because we live in a digital age doesn’t automatically mean digital is always best. Too often a digital approach is taken for communicating benefits because a sweeping assumption is made that everyone’s preference is to now access information online or more likely there is a short-term cost saving to be made by eradicating print. Results like these, and others we have seen, prove that for the right audience, paper-based communications can still be extremely successful and represent a far greater return on investment in terms of employee engagement than any short-term cost saving that may be made by taking a digital approach.