Chris Britton
Last week we were delighted to welcome over 100 HR heroes to the Underbelly Theatre in Soho, London for RGER Live 2025 - with many more tuning in virtually!
The day's theme was "Budgets, Benefits & The Bottom Line," and the objective was to encourage people teams across the country to think differently, maximise the impact of their work, draw clearer lines to ROI and stand tall against a backdrop of challenging economic conditions.
Hosted by a mix of RGERs, esteemed clients and industry experts, the day’s agenda was packed full of insightful presentations, panels and fireside chats that ignited conversation and got us firing on all cylinders.
If you weren’t able to make it, or simply want to revisit the magic of the day, all of the recordings and slides can be found in our RGER Live 2025 On-Demand Hub.
We saw some fantastic participation over the course of the day, with a flurry of interesting questions contributed by both virtual and in-person guests for our presenters to answer. But, as we didn’t have enough time to answer them all on the day, I’ve decided to go through the remaining questions in a short Q&A below, in my attempt to leave no stone unturned...
How important is it that the leadership of the organisation is involved in supporting the People Strategy for it to have impact?
It would be unreasonable to ask HR teams to be the only people in the organisation driving your people agenda. Having leadership (and managers) on board with the importance of what you are trying to achieve is important so it becomes everyone’s business - not just an HR thing. If there is any resistance or apathy from leadership, then build the strategy in conjunction with them so they feel like they have a voice and have been listened to. Using data to back up the ‘why’ makes it much more compelling.
What are the key skills that you think leaders need to bring appreciation to life?
There are a few skills that really drive appreciation forward and they are all ‘human’ in nature. Things like empathy, self awareness, flexibility and kindness. These all come under the banner of emotional intelligence. Leaders who are emotionally intelligent will find the value in appreciation and their people will see the authenticity in them.
How can we reframe an EVP to ensure there is a balance in the physiological contract and avoid a staff entitlement culture?
This one comes down to transparency and employee voice. It is first important to remember that we cannot please everyone all of the time. But we can use evidence-based practice to produce an EVP that hits the mark for the majority. I would recommend being honest with your employees about the work you are doing on things like employee engagement, wellbeing, R&R and appreciation and introduce a test-and-learn approach. This means your employees know you are working to produce great people initiatives with them at the heart but you will not be seeking perfection and you truly value their feedback along the way.
Being transparent about how much benefits cost is also something to consider- it is not an unlimited pot so to pivot from one approach to another, it usually means something has to give. As long as you tell that story and keep people updated on the why- then they will understand.
What's the first step people teams can take in an organisation where recognition is seen as a distraction rather than value add?
This feels like a ‘purpose’ issue. If the business is not seeing the purpose or value behind recognition or appreciation then it could feel like an additional admin task or thing to do. I would recommend starting with building a business case for appreciation.
You can use a mixture of your own people data, statistics from our Economic Value Study, and even our customisable Business Case Blueprint. These can be used to demonstrate the commercial value that appreciation brings to the organisation as well as the impact it will have on productivity and employee engagement.
How do you make sure the business, not just HR, lives wellbeing?
Knowing and planning how to make wellbeing a key component of your entire company’s culture is a great place to start. Whatever plans you put in place, tell people what you are doing and why. You might also want to pay extra attention to informing those influential voices like leaders and managers who can then amplify your updates and messaging.
Make your strategy readily available for everyone to see and ensure it has been built using employee voice and other people data. Forget the Big Bang launches and instead focus on the day to day things. This could include managers feeling equipped, people knowing how they can self help, leadership sharing stories about their own journeys and employee resource groups owning the messaging.
What does your wellbeing strategy look like? What ideas are you launching?
The Reward Gateway | Edenred wellbeing strategy is purpose-built around the Total Employee Experience pyramid and is a key part of our people strategy. We are overt with our messaging around why this stuff matters as this helps our people understand how much we value them but also holds us to account to make sure we deliver on what we say we will. We continually finetune our strategy so it’s important to represent it as a live and dynamic direction of travel because needs and demands from employees change all the time. We are focussing more on the ‘prevention’ side of wellbeing (albeit with clear support in place in crisis situations). This means things like in-person health screenings, access to financial wellbeing through nudge and self-help learning through Unmind. We keep all things continually under review to make sure they are what our people want.
How do you ensure that the messaging doesn't get overwhelming for employees and they don’t have too much information on their screens?
A key to this is being thoughtful and deliberate. If you make the messaging meaningful to people then it becomes a value add rather than a distraction. With that said, planning out messaging that makes sense is a good way to go. Perhaps map around cultural events like international women’s day, mental health awareness week etc. so that the content is relevant to what is going on more widely. It is also worth considering the freshness of any content or messaging. A simple comms plan can help with this. This could look like this- how long do you want the content to be visible? Who is your target audience? What does good look like in terms of interaction with the content? Are there any times of the day/week/month that you want less messaging to focus on other stuff.
How do you prevent survey fatigue?
Having a clear plan in place of the surveys you want to do and, more importantly, what you want to gain from them is a good place to start. Once you know ‘why’ you want to ask people for their opinion you can map surveys around that and give people plenty of notice. In my experience, doing a bigger engagement survey is about getting general business wide themes (one a year feels about right here).
Following up with pulse surveys into those themes to get more meat on the bone is a good way to go. Aim for high completion rate for the company wide survey but accept lower completion for the targeted pulse surveys. Also building in purposeful and thoughtful breaks into the survey rhyme gives you time to make a difference but also gives your people some breathing space.
Where salary sacrifice is an issue due to National Minimum Wage, what else can we do?
Where a salary sacrifice benefit works by reducing an employee's taxable pay before tax and National Insurance contributions are made in order to pay for the goods/services they’ve purchased, a salary deduction scheme provides an alternative for employees on National Minimum Wage.
Salary deduction schemes take the payments from an employee’s net salary (after-tax), ensuring that their initial payment does not go below the National Minimum Wage threshold. Like salary sacrifice, these salary deduction benefits also provide an interest and debt-free repayment plan as a helpful and safe alternative to loans and credit cards.
Examples of popular salary deduction benefits are SmartTech™ and Cycle to Work.
Do you have any clients with experience of an internal annual employee awards event that had an impact in terms of employee engagement and retention?
One of our clients, Cruise.co.uk is a fantastic example of an organisation who used a creative internal awards ceremony as a key feature of its recognition & reward programme to drive incredible improvements in employee engagement and retention.
The company’s 'Magical Moments' R&R programme enables any employee to nominate a colleague across the business to be in with a chance of being selected as one of five winners in each quarter. Each winner was rewarded with a £50 voucher, but most importantly was shortlisted for a Magical Moment of the Year award.
Three of those quarterly winners were then selected to play for Magical Moment of the Year at the company’s annual conference. Here they competed in a version of the popular gameshow Blankety Blank, where each corrected matched answer provided a monetary award. The winner of this game then went on to play the company’s version of Ant & Dec’s ‘Win the Adverts’ - again resulting in more prizes being awarded and creating a huge buzz within the organisation, all thanks to the power of recognition.
The team at Cruise.co.uk believe that the impact of Magical Moment of the Year and their recognition programme has been one of the key drivers behind the improvement of labour turnover from 31% to 12% in just two years. In fact, such great work saw the company win the most impactful reward and recognition strategy category at The Appreciation Awards 2024.
You can visit our case study library to read the full story.
How can teams collaborate and interact with each other if at home? Booking meetings to talk hasn’t worked for us.
Our Workplace Connection Report found that when employees were asked what would drive feelings of connection between teams, the third most popular suggestion (at 32%) was time and space for non-work-related conversations. With the second most popular (33%) being regular check-ins with managers, it’s clear that putting connection on the agenda in the form of team meetings, 1:1 catch-ups and in-person socialising is still very much needed.
But to improve the engagement with, and impact of, virtual meetings to socialise, it’s important to ensure that your managers are fully embracing them. Are your managers cancelling or rescheduling booked slots when the workload is high? Are they using this time to recognise their people and celebrate their achievements? For companies with hybrid working, agreeing on set days that align with most of the team’s plans or preferences can ensure you’re a larger group when you do come into the office.
As we come to the end of our Q&A, I'd like to say yet another thank you to all of our fantastic attendees at this year's RGER Live. Whether you journeyed to the Underbelly or joined in online, you played a huge part in making the day as engaging and valuable as it was.
If you have any other questions or are interested in discovering how your organisation can tackle Benefits, Budgets & The Bottom Line in 2025 and beyond, why not get in touch with one of our employee experience experts?
