Media organisation consolidates employee engagement platform to drive ROI of £100,000

Discovery Communications moved from a sporadic offering to a consolidated platform which better communicated to staff about their available benefits. Now, 88% of their employees have a clear understanding of their benefits and the platform paid for itself with a return on investment of £100,000.

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88%

employees have clear understanding of benefits

82%

employees are happy with what's on offer to them

What they needed

Discovery saw rapid business expansion between 2013-2015. This, coupled with changes in internal structures and new UK pension legislation, created a need for a significant review of their benefits offering, tools, and processes. It was also recognised that having an agile system in place would allow for easier change management in the event of future business changes or expansions. The review focused on two key areas.

The first was to support Discovery’s goal of a ‘One-Team; One-Discovery’ unified workforce by providing a consistent, cost-effective offering in which all employees have access to a market competitive benefits package. The second key area for Discovery was to simplify benefit enrolment by creating an agile, user-friendly platform, promoting greater engagement in benefits with communications that ‘Educate, Excite, and Unite’ employees.

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Industry:

Media

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Number of employees:

1,000

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Platform features:

Employee engagement platform

How we helped

Discovery took a holistic approach to springboard their benefits offering forward with strong foundations for the future. This began with putting in place an agile platform which would meet their evolving business needs. They built an in-house bespoke Benefits Portal that provides access to real-time data and gives easy access through Single Sign-on. Visual step-by-step trackers make each stage of the enrolment process visible and the online benefit statement helps employees understand the value of their package. Moving away from their incumbent provider, gave an opportunity to design new internal processes that simplify enrolment and help employees understand their options.

The platform was promoted with a communications strategy which targeted all employees with tailored messages and utilised the existing Benefit branding, ‘Ben the dog’ – Discovery employee’s benefits buddy. Ben added a crucial element of fun which reflected the culture and brand consistency, reducing any ‘change’ anxiety. Communications used multiple channels and platforms across the business to make sure the message reached employees.

Supplementing the communications strategy, Discovery’s Team reduced manual tasks by developing 25 automated email scenarios to communicate on key topics such as new joiner information and developed jargon-free one-pagers. 

 

What they achieved

Benefit take-up has increased steadily since launch and over a third of employees have chosen to take better advantage of the enhanced pension contributions available to them. A staff survey reported that 88% of employees now have a clear understanding of their benefits and 82% are happy with what’s on offer – feeding into overall engagement of 90%.

Discovery’s Team has also benefited from the success of the new system as administration has become much easier with monthly payroll processing time reduced from five days to one. This has enabled the whole team to focus on added value activities and further engagement.