Preventing “benefits burnout”: How to ensure high adoption and ROI on employee benefits

One of the biggest barriers to introducing new employee benefits – or any employee engagement program, for that matter – is ensuring employees access or use it to fully experience the advantages, so that the investment proves worthwhile to the business.

There are two critical factors that support high employee benefits adoption: Offering a selection of relevant and accessible benefits, and ensuring these are communicated consistently from the moment the employee joins your team.

This has certainly proven true for the team at Insight, a global Fortune 500 tech company that takes pride in creating a strong company culture and providing benefits that support its people from the day they join the team.

In this HR Heroes post, Marea Phillips, Director of People and Culture APAC, unpacks how the team at Insight encourages high participation and uptake.

Q: How do you introduce benefits from the very beginning, when a new person joins the team at Insight?

Marea: Before an employee joins us, we send them some branded chocolate that says, "Welcome to Insight." Now that's an example of a “cheap and cheerful” low-cost employee benefit, but people like it – it goes to their home, they can show it to their family.

When they join the business they get a package which includes branded merchandise and information about how to get on board with all the benefits that we actually provide.

We make sure that our employee discounts are activated for our new employees so that they have the opportunity to access them immediately. Then, during the course of their induction program, HR get in touch with their teammates to make sure that they're aware of the reward and recognition program and how to access and use the Inside Insight benefits platform.

Q: You’ve done a lot of work to communicate your employee benefits to your national team – tell us about how you make them all part of life at Insight?

In addition to our internal marketing, we have a quarterly all teammates, all-hands meeting where we talk about the benefits to make sure that everyone is aware of what's available.

We have an email called “In the Loop” that goes out every month, and we talk about the various benefits that we have in the organisation, and let people report back on the things they have been involved in, or what they’ve used their benefits on.

We also have TV screens in every location, and we update what’s displayed every fortnight to make sure that people are aware of the different types of benefits available to business, what's new and how to access various applications.

Q: Are there any employee benefits that you’re particularly proud of, that could you use as examples when it comes to communicating your employee benefits program, news or updates to the rest of your teammates?

I particularly like our work-life balance days – that has been one of the most successful benefits that we've put out in the business. Our people don't need to tell us why they're going to have a day off, they just put into the system they're having a “work-life balance day.”

I also love our hackathons because they provide a meaningful projects for our technologists work on where for example they develop apps that support issues that are impacting Australians. We provide the team with various projects we could work on and they decide which one they want to develop and support. Recently we worked with some incredible people at OzHarvest, where we are developing technology to support the organisation to reduce food wastage in Australia.

Our team also enjoys the employee benefits platform from Reward Gateway because they can use it at any time. I use it myself to buy movie tickets, shop at Country Road and David Jones – especially when there is a sale. We all use it, and we can report easily to our Leadership Team and to our teammates so they can see where they can save the most money.

Q: Is there anything you have implemented so that employees can access benefits when they’re not logged into an internal system?

The majority of our teammates can access their benefits or information via an app on their phone – typically they’re using it when they finish work or over the weekend. Our “Inside Insight” platform tells them all about the benefits available, provides links to access their discounts, and also has links to different options or information about when and how to use it.

Q: How do you ensure that your menu of employee benefits contains things that are relevant and will be adopted by your people at Insight?

This is our biggest challenge and requires a day in day out, never-ending assessment of what is actually happening inside and outside of the business.

We survey our staff regularly and ask them to rate the value of their existing benefits on a scale of one to five – that has helped us shape the menu and expand or change our offering as their focus changes.

To support this, we recently introduced a process in the business called Connection One-on-One where the teammates meet with their career coaches or culture champions to talk about what we do well here at Insight and what we need to do better.

This feedback allows us to monitor what our team need and want, and whether we need to change the benefits so they’re relevant to teammates across the business and support them as they grow. This is key to getting take-up –keeping in the know about what they want and being creative and finding things that excite them.

Curious about how an employee benefits platform could improve how you communicate your offerings? Get in touch with us to see how we could help!