Choice Isn’t Everything

Nick Hale, Founding Director of award-winning employee benefits consultancy and brokerage Engage Health Group, challenges the idea of choice within employee benefits.

Everyone seems to agree that offering choice is essential when it comes to employee benefits today. The idea is simple: give the employee what they want and hey presto, you have a scheme that delivers a strong ROI.

But is that necessarily the case?

For many HR teams offering choice has become the Holy Grail and so they focus their energies on setting up the processes that make it possible. While this is certainly important, choice comes with challenges and it may blind HR teams to some of the most important fundamentals of delivering an employee benefits scheme that delivers on ROI.

The problem with choice

The ideal employee benefits scheme mutually benefits the employee and business. What’s good for the employee will often be good for the employer, but this won’t always be the case. For example, providing a pool table may hinder staff productivity rather than help! It’s all about finding that sweet spot where the needs of the employer and employee meet in the middle.

More widely, you may encounter such a diverse range of demands that it becomes impossibly expensive to fulfil all their wishes. We’ve often helped clients who’ve tied themselves in knots trying to offer the widest possible choice.

Sometimes it’s better to laser focus on the benefits which are truly meaningful – that provide the most assistance to employees, which in turn provides optimal ROI for the business.

While the world of workplace benefits is fast-evolving, some trends remain the same. We’ve held various workplace surveys over the years and one key question we’ve always posed is: what is your biggest life priority? From a list of 10-12 choices, the top two results are always the same regardless of the wider economic environment: “my family’s health” followed by “my personal health”.

By focusing on these two areas you can be pretty sure you’re offering support that is really appreciated. Private Health Insurance is always in high demand as it has a strong preventative element – it’s not just a reactive solution. Access to virtual GPs has been a particularly popular feature of these policies in recent years. On the other hand, a Group Health Cash Plan is an underrated lower cost alternative as it focuses purely on everyday health concerns, such as physiotherapy, dentistry and eyecare.

To ensure that you’re doing a good job of looking after the health and wellbeing of employees, it’s worth dividing the task into three parts: physical health, mental health and financial health. Get these three bases covered and your benefits have a strong foundation. Too often these fundamentals are getting overlooked in the rush to provide choice.

Surmounting the tech challenge

The importance of offering choice should not be overlooked. Digital benefits platforms have a key role to play here. However, it’s a fast evolving and complex marketplace to navigate. There are countless platforms offering different features, functionality and integrative capabilities. HR teams will need to ensure all their tech tools work seamlessly together, which is not always easy – especially when four in 10 workers have to juggle between five and nine different HR programmes, according to a survey by Applaud!

But when employee benefits platforms are correctly implemented and integrated they do a great job of enabling ease-of-access for staff and ease-of-management for HR. As well as enabling choice between workplace health and protection schemes, many deliver discount schemes which can offer something for every need.

When offering choice, the benefits selection should be guard-railed by the employer. I.e. HR provide the selection, while the employee gets to choose. But it’s also important that these benefits are carefully selected so that they cover the three pillars mentioned earlier: physical, mental and financial wellbeing.

Benefits platforms have previously been out of reach for many businesses, but it is becoming more reasonably priced for SMEs as the technology evolves.

Again, it’s worth sounding a word of warning: technology is forever adding new capabilities which sound beguiling in their promise. But how much of it is essential? And how much of it will lead to new layers of complexity rather than achieve the promise of simplifying benefits and truly delivering for employees?

The focus should be on delivering the fundamentals of a good benefits scheme and evolving it over time. There are many options available depending on what point you are at in your business journey. Choose wisely!

Choice is a work in progress

The key point here is not to deride the importance of choice, but instead to emphasise the importance of getting the foundations right. It can be easy to lose sight of what’s essential in a world of infinite possibilities.

The danger is that in creating a complex web of personalised benefits, you may overlook the most important levels of support you can offer which will both help the employee and deliver optimal ROI.