Is your benefits strategy missing a digital trick? 

With so much at stake, it’s understandable that most employers have been adding layer upon layer to their benefits offering. Unfortunately, this hasn’t always achieved the desired outcomes. It’s now estimated that UK employers could be spending up to £15bn on benefits staff do not want, with just 23% of employees in the private sector saying their current benefits package meets all their needs.

Fortunately, the ongoing rise of digitisation and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now taking benefits personalisation to a new level. Improved analytics tools also deliver real-time data insights to help you optimise your benefits spend and align your strategy with wider business goals.

By selecting the right benefits technology, you can maximise return on your investment while attracting and retaining the talent needed for the future. Get this wrong and you can create or increase cyber-security and administration risks. This means it’s important to consider the following five factors when deciding which employee benefits technology platform to use:

Does the employee benefits platform give employees the flexibility and choice to access the benefits they want, when they want, from any device? Also, does it seamlessly integrate with your wider Human Resources (HR) eco-system to automatically let employees know about relevant benefits that they receive or are eligible to select? For example, maternity or paternity-related benefits after the birth of a child, or targeted health screening benefits as they get older?

Does it also support people in their everyday ‘moments that matter’, whether they’re struggling with the cost of living, or just want help to access a virtual GP or workout video. How will it converse with the employee about how they’re feeling or share relevant content from your existing benefit providers? How can you leverage a rule-based configuration approach, so employees only see information that is relevant to them as an individual?

No matter how impressive the employee interface, it’s also important to look under the hood of any employee benefits platform to make sure it supports your overall benefits design and strategy, instead of being a stand-alone ‘bolt on’.

For example, if you have a clear Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) objective to increase take-up of green benefits, or a menopause benefit to increase retention of senior female talent, but the benefits platform can’t promote these benefits to the relevant employees, you need to think again. It can be helpful to talk to your benefits consultant, or broker, about which employee benefits platform they provide to make sure all the pieces will fit together, in an intuitive, cohesive way.

Many employers are still failing to maximise return on investment from their employee benefits spend. An employee benefits platform should not only provide employees with a personalised total reward statement, showing the full value of their employer’s investment in them, but also provide real-time data insights for employers on how employees are interacting with their benefits.

These can range from which benefits employees are selecting to actual utilisation and, where relevant, any tax and national insurance savings being generated. This will enable you to see which benefits are being well utilised and delivering a return and which need rethinking or better promotion. If accessing data on demand, via self-service, is a priority for you, be sure to make it a requirement when selecting your preferred benefits platform provider.

The potential for employee benefits technology to free up already overstretched HR teams is immense. However, if your broker is different to your employee benefits provider, you could find yourself fielding requests for the sharing of information between the two, trying to co-ordinate renewal dates or trying to format and pass data between them. By removing the need to share highly sensitive employee data with multiple third-party providers, you can significantly reduce potential data risks.

By working with a broker that has their own employee benefits platform, you will eliminate the need for you to act as a ‘piggy in the middle’ and ensure that your provider can automatically obtain all the information they need, and update benefits descriptions and rates as required. Employees who call up the benefits platform helpline, with questions about their level of cover for example, will also be able to get an immediate response, instead of the benefits technology provider having to refer them on to a 3^rd party.

Finally, but by no means least important, is the benefits platform truly automated to reduce the need for humans to manually manipulate highly sensitive employee data? For example, if an employee opts into a new benefit, or adds a dependent, does this automatically let the provider know, or does someone in HR, or at the benefits platform provider, then have to complete additional steps to enrol them?

True automation not only saves administrative time and money, but it also reduces the risk of human error. This in turn reduces the risk of employees finding out they haven’t been added to a scheme when attempting to make a claim, and the cyber security and data breaches employers now view as their biggest people risk.