Clare Nowell
4 min read
When you start a new job, the most likely question your friends and family will ask, after establishing what your new job actually is, what are the benefits like? The total value proposition is more important than ever as salaries compete with the rising cost of living. It can make the difference between being an employer of choice or simply fading into the background.
But what’s the point of offering a fantastic reward package if your employees don’t understand it or worse, don’t know about it?
The range of benefits you offer as an employer will help you attract, engage and retain good employees as well as reflect your culture. Let’s take a look at how a good employee engagement platform can help with each stage of the employee journey.
Step 1: Attracting staff.
An employee’s life cycle at a company starts with recruitment. This is when you really want to sell yourself as an employer. You want good people to want to work for you, not just because of the job but for the culture, which is underpinned by the range of employee benefits you offer.
Think about the channels that you use to promote job vacancies and what leads people to apply. As an HR professional, it’s vitally important to convey the best bits about what it’s like to work for your organisation, in order to attract the right people. Think about what specific benefits would appeal to your ideal candidate and make sure your overall benefits package is relevant to their needs.
Looking longer term, being a well-recognised employer of choice can make the job of recruitment much easier. If you’ve won awards for your benefits or been listed as a Best Company to Work for, it’s likely the job applications will come flooding in without you having to lift a finger. That’s the best possible outcome you’re aiming for!
Step 2: Engaging staff.
One step forward and once you’ve successfully recruited the right person, it’s your job to make the total value proposition visible and accessible to that new starter. It’s vital to make it clear exactly what they can expect from you as an employer in a straightforward, jargon-free manner.
A single, unified engagement hub provides a platform for you to communicate whatever message you need to, throughout that employee’s journey with you. A good hub will be a consistent presence for employees, regardless of the stage of their lifetime with the company. Your best case scenario is that it will become an integral part of their life at work, which is ultimately achievable if you provide the right user experience.
Your approach to engaging employees needs to reflect your target audience. For example, if you are trying to communicate with a large number of field staff who are always on the road, a branded lanyard, ice scraper or air freshener might do the trick. Another fantastic way to engage is to reach out to the employee’s family at home, where some of the benefits you offer might have the most effect.
Employee benefits need to be widely communicated, celebrated and promoted to reach as many people in your workforce as possible. They need to be understood clearly, delivered in the right way and they need to be engaging; not just a list of dull benefits that doesn’t mean anything.
Step 3: Retaining staff.
Retaining employees has never been more of a challenge for HR. Today a job for life no longer exists; people move around and get swayed to other jobs for a variety of reasons. A good employee benefits portal may be the key to reinforcing job satisfaction and making employees want to stay with your company.
Communicating your business objectives through an employee engagement hub can help embed your mission in every employee’s sense of purpose, making your employees feel valued and significant. In turn this will motivate them to perform well, which is crucial for business success.
As Dan Pink’s book Drive explains, people are motivated by making a difference far more than they are ever motivated by money. It follows that a good engagement platform will form a better retention strategy than simply giving your people a pay rise.
Are you using an employee engagement portal effectively at each stage of the employee life cycle? We’d love to hear how you’ve used an engagement platform to attract, engage and retain good people. Share your advice in the comments below.