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Evaluating your online platform – are you asking the right questions?

How well do your staff benefits support the business? Can you quantify the success of your reward strategy against criteria such as cost-effectiveness, employee appreciation and overall market competitiveness?  Do you know how your benefits compare to others in your sector, and do you have a clear course of action for developing your strategy in the future?
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How well do your staff benefits support the business? Can you quantify the success of your reward strategy against criteria such as cost-effectiveness, employee appreciation and overall market competitiveness?  Do you know how your benefits compare to others in your sector, and do you have a clear course of action for developing your strategy in the future? By Jeff Fox, principal at Aon Employee Benefits.

If the answer to any of those questions is ‘don’t know’, it might be time to review not just your benefits strategy, but also the way that it is delivered.  Being able to collate information like this is essential if reward and HR are to demonstrate the effectiveness of employee benefits and build the business case for future investment.

Using an appropriate online benefits platform can support better evaluation of and staff engagement with benefits. The right solution will not only support good data insights and connectivity with systems elsewhere in the company, but will also match the quality of user experience that staff will be used to outside work when banking or shopping online.

But how do you get the right platform for your business?  Again, it’s all about asking the right questions:

Does it save time?
An effective platform should reduce administration and free up HR time to spend on other things.  Online platforms make administration much more streamlined – there’s no need for manual intervention in most processes, and self-service tools mean that employees can manage most aspects of their benefits without any input from the HR team.

Reporting on metrics such as benefits take-up is also made equally straightforward, as all the data is centralised.

Once reward processes are automated, it also opens the way to connecting with other HR systems to create much richer insights into how your workforce operates. Those insights can then be used at a more strategic level, for workforce planning and to identify areas for improvement within the business as a whole.

Is it secure?
Well managed information can also improve data protection and cyber security. Human factors, whether malicious or accidental, remain one of the biggest risks when it comes to cyber security.  IBM’s 2017 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index*, which measures attacks on online systems, found that in industries such as healthcare and financial services around half of businesses’ security problems (46% for healthcare, 53% for financial services) came from ‘inadvertent actors’ – staff who unintentionally caused a security breach.  Reducing the number of people with access to personal reward data means it should be more secure.

Does it help with recruitment and retention?
Many online platforms also allow you to brand communications and benefit content, reinforcing the relationship between what’s on offer and the employer who is providing it.  That not only helps to build engagement and improve staff retention, it also means that a disparate selection of benefits from different providers appears as a coherent offering.

A clearer picture of your benefits offering means that comparing yourself with others in the same sector becomes much more straightforward.  Potential employees can then understand exactly how they will benefit from making a move to work with you.

Does it improve engagement?
Online platforms and the data they collect provide huge opportunities for improving staff engagement.  Manual record and standalone spreadsheets make it almost impossible to get a ‘big picture’ view of benefit take-up and usage trends.  Segmenting and targeting communications is far easier when all of your benefits information is in one place.

As the saying goes, you only get one opportunity to make a good impression, and using an online platform can really help with giving new employees a positive experience.  Making it quick and easy to sign up for benefits in one place makes it easy for joiners to see what’s on offer to them and its total value.

Regardless of how long they’ve been with your company, most staff will now be used to the type of user experience they get from online banking, shopping and health tracking apps. It has become the norm outside work for individuals to be able to check their personal details and research background information on the move. But many reward (and broader employee-facing HR systems) come nowhere near offering a comparable experience. Using an online platform can make significant strides towards a better experience that users will want to return to over and over again.

Does it save money?
This might be the first, rather than the last, question on many decision makers’ lips, however the answer lies in the points I’ve made above. Reducing HR administration time, improving staff engagement and retention, better quality planning and strengthening recruitment opportunities all have a direct impact on a business’s ability to cut costs and generate future growth.

But proof of cost saving and revenue generation will only become evident if you have clear, appropriate metrics both for your overall reward strategy and for an online platform’s role within it. Using a benchmarking tool, such as Aon’s The Benefits Score, can help you to make sure your measures are realistic. Quantifying engagement, comparing your offering to others in your sector, establishing best practice for data use, then using all of that information for future planning and reward design is fast becoming a core business need.  The future success of your benefits strategy depends on asking the right questions.

Contact us for more information:
letstalkbenefits@aon.co.uk
0344 573 0033
aon.co.uk/employeebenefits

http://www.aon.com/unitedkingdom/employee-benefits/online-benefits-and-communications/the-benefits-score.jsp

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