As an employer, the cost of delivering meaningful benefits that provide value to your people can cost a very considerable amount. For the level of expenditure, you want to make sure that these benefits are being fully valued, understood and utilised by your workforce.
Employee benefits platforms are a perfect way to make your benefits more accessible for your people, encouraging them to take control and enhance their wellbeing by utilising the great benefits you offer. However, it won’t just be your people that will be set to gain from a good employee benefits platform, it can also bring very valuable improvements to your business as a whole.
Now is the time for businesses to either embrace the innovation that technology can bring to their employee benefits strategy, or face being left behind. Within this article, we’ll be sharing 5 key reasons as to why incorporating a good employee benefits platform is a worthwhile investment for your business, both for 2023 and beyond.
1. Engagement and accessibility
By making your benefits easily accessible, it’ll encourage your people to engage with them more and empower them to get the most out of the great products available to them.
Making sure your workplace benefits are widely known can also help you to stand out as a company that offers particularly good benefits to their people, allowing you to stand out from your competitors and thus helping you to attract and retain the very best talent.
Smartphones have leapfrogged laptops to become the most common device used to access the internet, so making your workplace benefits mobile phone accessible on-the-go is another great way to further enhance the employee journey and experience. A consistent, reliable employee benefits platform means every member of your workforce receives the same exceptional experience – no matter where they are in the world.
2. Ease of administration
In their everyday lives, your people want technology that is simple to use, intuitive and accessible - why should the benefits technology you implement be any different? By selecting a platform that has these three key areas at its core, you will allow your business to effectively decrease the time and resource spent administering your benefits.
A good employee benefits platform will:
- Automate and streamline the process of reviewing and approving benefit selections, as well as running key reports.
- Integrate benefits with other internal platforms – like HR - so everything is centralised and you can share data much more easily.
- Send handy alerts and notifications when anything relating to your benefits scheme needs actioning, so you’ll always be kept up to date.
- Make it easier to update key benefit information, including links and videos, ready to be made immediately available to eligible employees.
3. Reporting
Through their decisions, your people are giving you key data that should be used to refine your workplace benefits strategy. A benefits platform will keep all your reporting in one place, helping you to answer important questions, such as:
- Which benefits are particularly popular?
- Which benefits might you be you wasting money by having?
- Are there any trends or patterns that you can optimise?
By basing your workplace benefits strategy on the habits of your people, you can create a more personalised platform that has your people’s needs at its heart, which will in turn encourage your people to engage with and get more out of your employee benefits. Your platform can also display total reward, to show your employees exactly how much value they’re in receipt of in addition to just their salary, and If your people understand your employee value proposition, it will support the creation of a more motivated workforce.
4. Increased productivity
Using employee benefits technology will remove traditional data bottlenecks, allowing information to be shared much more easily between different sections of your business. This will enable your HR and payroll departments to collaborate and integrate much more seamlessly, which will streamline your processes, reduce your admin and help to increase overall productivity.
Furthermore, for end-users in both HR and payroll there is only one platform, reducing both training time and costs.
5. Security and compliance
We know how vital it is to keep your company data protected. Employee benefits technology can form a part of your commitment to upholding data security, which is why it is such a worthwhile investment. The less ‘distance’ your data has to travel and the less vendors it has to pass through, the less risk there is to your business.
Employee benefits platforms help to give you complete peace of mind, by enforcing measures like:
- Encrypting all sensitive data
- Providing multi-factor authentication (MFA) as standard
- Ensuring the platform supports your commitment to GDPR compliance