Last year at Top Employers we certified 750 companies around the world. Each of these organisations has made the decision that participating with us will benefit them as an organisation, and that decision is made through a number of meetings with us both on the phone and in person. Each company that enters has their own reason for wanting to gain the certification, and one of the reasons why many companies are motivated to participate is because they know they have great working conditions in place for their employees, but their employees don’t always agree. During these meetings a light bulb often goes off and we hear the line “we’re not good enough about telling employees what we have in place for them”.
Most companies do a good job at communicating primary benefits to their people; salary, pension, and other monetary offerings that they have in place. This, of course, makes sense because some of these are driven by statutory law, but all of these are a major cost to employers and a major expectation of employees, therefore a priority to make sure everyone knows exactly what they are eligible for.
However, when it comes to secondary benefits, that’s where we start to see a difference in how well companies communicate to their employees. The most effective method seems to be when organisations have their own private website for their people. They need to make this a place that employees want to go to, so increasingly we are seeing staff access portals for self-scheduling or accessing payroll information through these sites…actions that will drive them to enter. And once they have signed in, these sites contain a multitude of engaging content; company news, business results, performance awards, CSR information, and opportunities for employees to network online with each other. These sites are often lively, creative and exciting – a perfect place to push out information about the things in place for employees. Secondary benefits schemes, training programmes, performance awards, suggestion programmes etc. They can even feature testimonials from other employees who took the training, raised money for charity, or received an award for something outstanding.
We see a lot of companies with some kind of flexible benefit scheme offer by a third party, who will often have online access for employees to find out about the benefit programmes, but these may or may not be customised to the look and feel of an individual organisation, therefore the opportunity to control the experience of the employee is limited.
But a surprising number of companies still have really exciting schemes in place that their employees aren’t using because they simply don’t know about them. That means that someone has worked hard to create a programme, get it approved, get it into place and then it sits unused. We find that many of our Top Employers use our programme to do an inventory of what they have in place and to use that as a jumping board to make sure that they are doing a really good job of talking about the exciting things that already exist within their organisation.
What do you do to ensure your people know about all the weird and wonderful employee offerings you have in place for them? We always love hearing from you!
