Employee Benefits Live 2016: Adecco Group UK and Ireland has moved from an annual flexible benefits enrolment window to monthly enrolment.
The change, which was introduced this year, aims to increase employee engagement and ensure that the organisation’s benefits package is available to all.
The transition to monthly enrolment forms part of wider changes to Adecco Group’s benefits strategy, which has been developed to enhance benefits engagement and understanding among its 3,200-strong UK workforce. This strategy is based around six key characteristics: the benefits programme should be relevant to the employee demographic; clearly communicated; the same for all; available for all; delivered online; and kept simple.
To ensure that the benefits available to staff were relevant to them, the organisation removed unpopular benefits, introduced new options, and improved existing benefit schemes, said Matthew Johnson, head of compensation and benefits at Adecco Group UK and Ireland.
Addressing delegates at Employee Benefits Live 2016, Johnson explained that surveys had found lifestyle benefits to be particularly popular among staff. With this in mind, the organisation introduced lifestyle benefits such as Tastecard. It also increased its holiday buy and sell scheme from a maximum of two to five days a year in 2016.
Other changes included the launch of a traditional contract hire scheme alongside the organisation’s existing car salary sacrifice scheme, in order to better suit the needs of high mileage drivers.
Johnson said: “We had a look at who our employees are and what we are actually offering. By honing down that list of benefits it then means that it’s easier us for to communicate those benefits to our employees and more particularly for them to understand why we are offering them at all.”
In response to employee feedback, all offline benefit transactions were moved online. This includes access to a pensions platform that enables staff to change their contribution levels, see the value of their pension, and find information and tutorials about pension saving.
Adecco Group also made improvement to its benefits communication plan. This included the introduction of individual benefit statements and the development of promotional material, such as leaflets and information about benefits in offer letters to new starters.
The organisation, which employs 3,200 staff in the UK, also took steps to engage managers to share key benefits messages with their teams. “Increasing management involvement is, for us, a really important thing. We know that people listen to their managers so as part of our benefits programme we try to engage our managers more,” said Johnson.