EMPLOYEE BENEFITS SOLUTIONS
The landscape for employee benefits is changing – not just in age, composition and expectations of the workforce, but also in the thinking surrounding employee wellbeing
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• Mindfulness: There is a greater awareness of mental as well as physical wellbeing. In a connected age, digital overload is a serious problem. Employees want flexible working and the ability to have downtime and meet commitments outside of work. • Intuitive workplaces: Technology has changed the ways employees view data. The use of social media means more employees have digital profiles. Employers can capitalise on this trend by bringing in digital technologies to interact with their employees. Intranets can share news across departments, increase engagement and help employees select their own personalised benefit packages. • The Collaborative Workplace: Technology can break down the barriers between departments, locations and hierarchies. People are regularly working together with teams based in multiple locations. The report suggests this is sparking a shift away from traditional workplace traits associated with masculinity and gender aggression towards other traits such as empathy, flexibility, openness and collaboration. So how can employers evolve their benefits structure to account for these trends? The first way is to deliver greater flexibility and choice. A worker in his sixties will want something very different from graduates in their twenties. In addition, today’s generation of twenty somethings face different challenges and have different needs from those of previous years.
Today, they are saddled with student debt, rising rent prices and the seemingly impossible task of getting on the housing ladder. To assume the same package of benefits from yesteryear will work today is a fundamental error.
The New Workplace Socioeconomic shifts are seeing a change in the employer-employee relationship. For example, it used to be the role of government to provide education. Now, further education is becoming more and more expensive. The Unum report suggests we may see companies beginning to offer workplace training schemes as an incentive. Equally, flexible working is becoming increasingly important. Unum’s Financial Director Survey (2014) found that 78% of businesses offer flexible working as a benefit12. It’s easier to do this now than ever before thanks to the spread of cloud-based and online administrative systems. Employees no longer need to be in the office in order to make a full contribution. Benefits, therefore, need to evolve in a way which matches the way we work. They must be flexible, intuitive and wide-ranging. Managing such a complex structure and ensuring it achieves its goals is by no means straightforward. Technology can hold the key with a new generation of employee benefit portals. These will make it easier for employees to access their benefits and tailor them to their own needs.