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Q&A: Health & Wellbeing – Making it personal
30 January 2024 Health and Wellbeing
Following on from The HR World’s first webinar of the year, targeting Health and Wellbeing and sponsored by Engage Health Group, we posed two more questions to our panelists, Mike Hesch, Head of UK Employee Benefits at Engage and Gemma Lee, Chief People Officer at Konica Minolta Business Solutions.
1: Is there a danger of spending so much time, money/resource on asking employees about the benefits they’d like that you could make a scheme too expensive to run?
Mike Hesch: You can guide the employees to the options potentially available, based on your budget, then get their views on what they would value the most out of those options. As mentioned on the Webinar, most providers also offer extra free added value benefits as part of the plan – life assurance for example will generally also include a virtual GP, bereavement counselling, wellbeing and mental health support. Review what extras the plans you are considering come with as that can also really help keep cost and administration down.
Gemma Lee: We run our survey annually, aligned to the benefits review period. It’s cost effective to do so as it helps you to ensure the investment is aligned to the employee voice. Too much time spent on surveys can be costly and can also result in survey fatigue. It can be a challenge to align to everyone’s needs and therefore it can be more effective to ask for selections from an already defined planned. Completely open options may not possible and might not be affordable for the organisation. Also if there is a minimum take up that might affect benefits available – so that needs to be managed. Key with communication is to manage expectations after the survey too and be clear what benefits are selected. Consider options too that provide benefits for the employee but no outlay cost wise – eg day off for volunteering, wellbeing, birthday etc. Whilst time out has a cost it can be planned against business continuity – but it means a lot to people.
2: Does a business have to be of a certain size in order to start running worthwhile benefit schemes?
Gemma Lee: It would depend on the benefits and schemes. We have an employee base of 720 in the UK and are part of a global organisation therefore the benefits we offer with an outsource provider align to that. However there are lots of different options and benefits are expected by many employees – current and future.
Mike Hesch: In short no, in fact I would say it is easier to implement benefits/wellbeing when you are smaller. In addition if you start with a good core set of benefits wellbeing they will of course help you to attract and retain the existing staff, but those benefits can then be added to, if needed, to support any growth aspirations.