Over the past three years, builders’ merchant and home improvement retailer Travis Perkins has engaged in a long-term project to move its HR and payroll systems, including recognition awards, away from a manual, paper-based and administration-heavy in-house system.
The organisation has now moved its benefits and reward offering online, streamlining processes to ensure that its 30,000 UK workers have better access to their benefits and a more unified employee experience.
Helen McGowan, reward manager at Travis Perkins, says: “It was to make it easier for everybody to access. A lot of [benefits administration] was manual. It was streamlining it, bringing us all into the 21st century and making it a lot easier for everybody. [Employees] now can log in to their benefits account and they can see what benefits they’ve got, rather than having to call us or email us.”
Travis Perkins’ digital journey started in 2014, with the launch of its myPerks benefits platform, provided by Reward Gateway. This originally featured two websites, one for flexible benefits and one for voluntary benefits. In 2017, it was rebranded with the organisation’s new HR brand, myWorklife; myPerks now features voluntary benefits, a cycle to work scheme, financial wellbeing, a company car scheme via salary sacrifice, and retail discounts. Also accessible through a single link through the myPerks platform is the revised myBenefits site, which features the organisation’s flexible benefits offering and allows staff to click through various providers’ websites.
Reward Gateway’s Smart Spending app is also linked to the myPerks platform, and has been actively promoted by Travis Perkins for the past 12 months, since its implementation in July 2017. This allows employees to access their retail discounts while they are outside of work.
The organisation’s payroll system and long-service awards went online in 2017, and in the last nine months Travis Perkins has done the same for its managers’ award pots, so that directors across the business can share awards with employees, as and when they need to.
Most recently, a new online HR system was launched at the end of June 2018, for which all employees were given Google email addresses and accounts. This has, in turn, helped steer them to the benefits platform, which fits with the organisation’s holistic strategy. “[Employees] now have to log on to their Google account to book holiday, [and] managers need it to authorise holiday and approve sickness absences, so they can now click through into the various benefits sites so they can apply for benefits,” explains McGowan.
Between quarter two in 2017 and quarter two in 2018, there has been a 21.27% increase in membership of the myPerks platform, from 17,482 members to 21,200 members. Going digital has evidently reaped substantial rewards in terms of employee engagement.