Signet Trading Limited is best known for its high street retail brands including H.Samuel, Leslie Davis and Ernest Jones

When shopping around for a voluntary benefits provider early on in 2009, Signet were not just looking for an employee discount provider – they wanted someone who could give their HR function an identity.

Asperity have helped Signet to extract maximum value out of its Reward Gateway platform enabling them to showcase not only Asperity provided benefits but their own benefit information too. At the time of launch, there was no central place for Signet employees to find information on all of their benefits. So additional tabs were built in to Reward Gateway allowing Signet to provide information on its own corporate benefits such as life assurance, company car allowances and study aid provisions.

It wasn’t just information that was displayed. Asperity also developed some time saving tools for the HR Team. Any retail business will sympathise with the forever asked question ‘How much holiday do I have’ and this was true for Signet too. However, Asperity was able to create a Holiday Calculator for Signet to sit on Reward Gateway. The result is that queries to the office have dropped saving them time, while registrations on Reward Gateway have increased – Win:Win!

Having a great benefits site is one thing, but for it to be fantastic, people have to know about it and use it. With a predominantly offline workforce in over 550 retail locations across the UK, communication was always going to be a challenge.

Employee discounts were new to Signet, so the first task was to create interest, excitement and ultimately engagement. This would require a communications campaign designed to reach each and every employee and the foundation for this was the quarterly newsletter. The impact of this first piece of comms had a real positive impact on registration numbers and continues to do so with registrations increasing by around 30% after each posting.

“The ‘Tell Mel’ section has proved to be a really valuable tool bringing credibility when showing the type and level of savings available.”

The power of ‘recommendations’ should never be underestimated so Signet and Asperity together saw an opportunity to capitalise on this by introducing ‘Tell Mel!’ Signet employee, Melanie, was already an avid fan of Reward Gateway and her savings were soon featured in communications.

Other employees were encouraged to share their stories with the incentive to win prizes if their story was featured in the Newsletter. The ‘Tell Mel’ section has proved to be a really valuable tool bringing credibility when showing the type and level of savings available.

And it doesn’t stop there, Asperity took over as Signet’s childcare vouchers provider from January 2011. This is integrated into the heart of the Reward Gateway platform, bringing along improvements such as double the normal rate of discount at a selection of child related retailers and seven day per week Helpdesk.

“Asperity have helped Signet to extract maximum value out of its Reward Gateway platform enabling them to showcase not only Asperity provided benefits but their own benefit information too.”

Visible senior commitment to building benefits-orientated communities

One HR Director recorded a video introducing staff to the scheme, giving a personal tour and lending his authority to the programme. This video received 31,000 views in six weeks. This employer’s Rewards Community hosts video interviews where staff share savings tips winning an incentive for each story published. And the Twitter Group publicises new benefits in line with the corporate goal of making new technologies core to the business.

Engaging your Account Manager

Account managers should live and breathe the reward service seven days a week. Between them, they should know everything there is to know about what works and what doesn’t in voluntary benefits. As avid personal users of the scheme themselves, it would pain them to think that employees might be missing out on easily achievable savings potentially running up to £1,000 per annum per employee. We recognise that perhaps some employers see the provision of employee benefits as just ticking another to-do list box. Get the project implemented and then move onto something else. But for those HR Managers that really want to push benefits boundaries, account managers can provide much invaluable support.

Content, content, content

You can take employees to a benefits scheme but you can’t make them use it unless the offers are relevant and real. All your good work as an employer in raising awareness of discounts will come to grief if your employees are disappointed when they get there. You need style and substance, communications and content, breadth and depth of offers. The pay off is the very significant return on your investment.

You need style and substance, communications and content, breadth and depth of offers. the pay off is the very significant return on your investment.

Deploying product champions

Scheme success requires engagement at every level and particularly from line managers outside the HR department. We call them product champions and two employers in particular have recognised their value and invested time and money in getting them involved. A client with hundreds of locations, each with under 20 staff, has focused on champions to back up engagement competitions with points based schemes. These result in prizes for the area or divisional managers whose teams have achieved the highest level of participation by their direct reports. There is no doubt that, a twin track approach of motivating managers and employees has been responsible for significant improvements in engagement, in this case an astonishing 111% increase in three months.

Ensuring communications reach employees outside of Head Office

A major retailer recognised that a poster on an office noticeboard is, on its own, too passive to drive engagement. Their retail till system is used by all outlet staff and through it a survey was conducted on internet use at home among retail employees who do not have internet access at work. £1 was donated to their Charitable Trust for each completed survey and there was an astonishing participation rate of 33% revealing that up to 90% of staff shopped online. In a different organisation with staff based overseas as well as in the UK, Google Analytics reports reveal that employees as far away as Uzbekistan use the reward scheme. Whilst the Reward Gateway offer portfolio is limited to the UK, Ireland, Australia and the US, staff abroad have realised that retailers ship overseas and there are still gifts to be bought for family back home.

Motivating managers and employees has been responsible for significant improvements in engagement, in this case an astonishing 111% increase in three months.

Sure, we don’t have a legal team or a ten-person department dedicated to ordering stationery, but does that make us less important in the business world? I often wonder whether just the use of the label ‘SME’ is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘second class business’.

I am what you might call an SME crusader. These companies employ almost 60% of the private sector workforce and contribute to around 49% of UK turnover. Not so inconsequential now, you might think. And it’s not easy, supporting such a large part of our economy. SMEs invariably face a unique set of challenges that bigger companies just don’t understand: time constraints, communication issues, business development pressures. And, of course, the age-old challenge of effective staffing. All of this, whilst constantly needing to adapt to external or internal change. In the midst of a global downturn, I would argue that the staffing issue – and by that I primarily mean finding and retaining good staff – is one of the most crucial for SMEs.

A friend of mine is a Regional Director for a small chain of Health and Fitness Clubs in the South East. On a recent visit to one of the clubs, I found him in the reception, sleeves rolled up, mop in one hand and bucket in the other. Not the supervisory, managerial position I’d expected to see him in. As he carefully positioned the ‘slippery when wet’ sign, he laughed off my quip about leading by example. We’ve all been there; a unique feature of an SME is the culture of mucking in – none of this ‘well that’s not my job’ attitude that you might find in a larger business.

In addition to these SME-specific challenges, we also face the same challenges large corporations do – but generally without the same layers of support. So as we trundle through, adapting to and overcoming the myriad of business demands, we need to think about where HR falls into the bigger picture.

Strategies around staff retention – which may include training, development, pay and benefits – often fall to the bottom of the pile as they can be seen as less critical and not a direct link to profit. Yet, your staff are the single most important asset you have. Bill Gates, former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft once said: ‘Take away my 20 best people and virtually overnight Microsoft becomes a mediocre company’. Message: invest in your staff, and your business will shine.

Benefits has a crucial role to play in retaining good staff.

Benefits has a crucial role to play in retaining good staff and yet, according to a survey run by Oval Financial Services, 75% of staff in small businesses don’t understand the benefits available to them. Without the luxury of a whole benefits team, but rather an HR Officer that has many responsibilities within their remit, how can you effectively show your staff you care with the limited time and resource you have available?

One of the most powerful and cost effective ways to show your employees that you appreciate them, and encourage retention as a result, is by creating a user-friendly, well- communicated benefits package, that all your staff can engage with and that delivers real value for your staff. In my view, an engaged workforce is one that will invariably see you through any tough times the business may encounter.

An engaged workforce is one that will invariably see you through any tough times the business may encounter.

A smaller workforce shouldn’t mean compromising on the quality of your benefits programme. Beware of the ‘bronze’, ‘silver’ and ‘gold’ packages that incrementally reduce the quality of the product the lower you go (just because you have less employees!). Instead, look for a provider that offers you the same level of product quality and same high standards of service that the bigger organisations receive. At the same time, your provider needs to recognise the challenges an SME faces and go out of their way to ensure your staff are engaged with their benefits. And last but not least, your provider should make your benefits scheme hassle-free so that you can concentrate on other areas of the business.

Practically speaking then, your checklist should something like this:

• All your benefits in one place – that means local offers you have, pension schemes and anything else you’re offering to staff.
• An easy to access programme – online with a single login, no fuss, simple and straightforward.
• One point of contact – that really means one person to call when you need answers about anything from Management Information, Childcare Vouchers or the colour scheme on your programme’s website.
• An effective communications strategy – bespoke to your workforce and planned for you in advance so all the work required to make your benefits programme shine is taken care of for you.

If you find a benefits service that satisfies all the above then you are on to a good thing. Asperity is a small business too, and we make sure our SME clients receive the same high standards of product and service as our larger clients do. And we’ve got over 200 SME clients to prove it. Talk to us today to see how we can engage your workforce and help keep your business successful. Until then, we’ll see you on the flip side.

About the author

Shelley Packer heads up the Asperity360 team, a unit dedicated to servicing the SME market.

The consumer-facing private sale is used as a platform for brands to quickly sell old stock, without harming their brand’s image or competing with other distribution channels.

Consumer-facing private sale sites all suffer the same issues. Items are usually end of line, which means rather than negotiating a discount that will benefit the consumer, the brand offers a discount to seduce the consumer into buying something they don’t really need.

Sales are typically really short, ranging from 24 hours up to 4 days (or until everything is sold). This is because end of line stock is in limited supply and, once it’s all been sold, there’s no motivation on the brand’s part to source anymore.

Both of these issues are underpinned by what is arguably the biggest problem: consumer- facing private sales sites aren’t private at all. Anyone can join, for free. Even the sites that claim to be invitation only aren’t actually private. The consumer simply requests an invitation to join. Moreover, UK private sales brands are actively trying to recruit new members – even by advertising on national television! That doesn’t seem very private to us, so we’ve decided to offer a better solution.

SecretSale™ is a brand new offering from Asperity, bringing together the best, exclusive discounts on a range of fantastic products. the huge discounts come from negotiating directly with brands, cutting out the middle-men to ensure the best possible deal.

Each SecretSale™ features up to twelve product ranges including many exclusive brands that don’t discount to consumers. Savings of up to 70% on retail prices are available from brands including Le Creuset (up to 41% discount), Trunki (up to 56% discount) and Rotary (up to 56% off ). Each sale goes live on Monday morning and runs for a full 7 days (or until items are sold out).

SecretSale™ is the UK’s first truly private sale site. Only Reward Gateway users can access SecretSale™, and only your employees have access to Reward Gateway. This puts our SecretSale™ buyers in the position of power when negotiating discounts with brands.

Our audience is a strictly controlled closed-user group, which means, rather than accepting a discount on end of line stock to offload to your employees, we can negotiate significant savings on the things people want and need. And, as there isn’t such a limited supply of stock, each SecretSale™ runs for seven days. Giving each of your employees the opportunity to take advantage.

About the author

Ross Musgrove is the Head of Partnerships for Asperity Employee Benefits.

None of us think this downturn is going to last forever. We pretty much all hope it will disappear as quickly as it seemed to arrive.

Well, the same cannot be said for the issues we are faced with today concerning the environment and our impact on it. Any expert will tell you that unless we take action now to reduce our environmental footprint, our generation is going to leave a bleak legacy for our children’s future. Enough said. We can all take simple, practical steps that will make a world of difference, for a better world.

Most companies will have their own Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agenda and it would be surprising if ‘green’ and ‘sustainability’ didn’t play a huge part in that agenda, because it really is the collective responsibility of all organisations to tread as lightly as we can on our planet, whilst at the same time continuing to generate our profits. What’s more, our employees expect this from us.

Amongst your tens, hundreds or thousands of employees there will be instinctive green champions doing their upmost within their own lives. Employers hold to some extent an authoritative position in many people’s lives, and as such should be setting examples and encouraging awareness and behavioural change.

And then there is the commercial advantage. Not only can companies gain from saving on energy and resources, but many companies have already cottoned on to the connection between being a green company and being successful. Already there is evidence that the greener companies are winning the contracts and therefore attract the best people. Natural selection will prevail as it always does, so don’t be caught out.

“By harnessing a collective ground swell from all your employees you can amplify actions that individuals can take.”

A really good place to start is from the ground up. But how is it that 78% of organisations say that it’s important to encourage employees to find ways of improving the organisation’s impact on the environment, yet only 24% say they have used products or services in the area of green and ethical reward, benefits, motivation or communication* (and half of those are cycle to work schemes)?

The answer is that there isn’t a great deal of help available to them. Companies need a credible and easy to implement programme, with a low impact on HR Departments’ time, whilst also respecting the limitations on available budget.

It’s key to develop inspirational communications that encourage people to stop and think, and more importantly help people to see that there is a part for them to play, as most people tend to think their personal efforts are insignificant in the bigger picture.

“This programme takes care of three out of the four criteria items looked at by The Sunday Times 60 Best Green Companies”

By harnessing a collective ground swell from all your employees you can amplify actions of individuals. Communicate these changes as ‘the company’. For example:

“Turning off the tap while brushing your teeth can save over 5 gallons of water a day. If all staff at XyZ Co. did this we would save 2 million gallons each year!”

Then combine these drip feed communications with a structured green Reward & Recognition service and an interactive online portal and you have got a great programme that will have positive results.

In fact, a programme like this would take care of three out of the four criteria items looked at by The Sunday Times 60 Best Green Companies, which asserts that ‘green business is blooming’. When a heavyweight like The Sunday Times gets behind a concept, it becomes clear it can no longer be ignored. Make sure that your business incorporates enough green to bloom in the modern corporate world.

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About the author

Megan Gough is Head of Viridien, a new venture which enables employers to align their green agenda with their reward and benefits strategy.

But, just as some are getting to grips with distributing posters, running competitions, and sending information direct or by e-mail to employees, the world of benefits communications has stepped up a gear once again to incorporate social media.

Love it or hate it, social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs are pervading not only our private lives but our work lives too. While countless businesses use these media for marketing and research, only a handful have managed to effectively use social media in the workplace to harness, advocate and generate discussion around employee benefits with the employees themselves.

With 60% of adults in the UK accessing the internet every day or almost every day, whether it’s at home, at work or on their mobile, it seems crazy not to use the medium to its full potential when it comes to communicating your employee benefits package to staff.

WHY BOTHER?

Benefits communication is all about trying to reach the hard-to-reach and engage the unengaged. One of the great things about using Facebook or Twitter is that it aligns your discounts programme with your employees’ lifestyle outside of work. It creates an immediate connection between their employee benefits and their home life. Their employee discounts programme should fit into their existing lifestyle and habits, not the other way around. You want them to use the discounts on products and services to save them money on what they’re already buying.

What’s more, providing convenient, easy access to the platform through a Facebook page or a link on Twitter cuts out the potential barrier of ‘I don’t know what the URL is’ or worse, if the link is only on your intranet then you are counting on your employees to remember what the URL is rather than providing a link wherever possible so they don’t need to remember the URL. We are, after all, increasingly becoming a one-click, on-demand society.

HOW TO GO ABOUT IT

Inchcape Retail UK recently launched a Facebook page to communicate its discounts programme to employees. The HR team got the ball rolling by running an employee benefit survey which was completed by nearly half of the workforce, and returned a positive response to the suggestion of communicating through Facebook.

“Facebook offers a great opportunity to communicate some great benefits to our colleagues in a way that helps increase and maintain employee engagement,” says Inchcape’s HR Administrator, Rachel Begg. “The offers and savings available through the scheme generate a good deal of excitement among our employees so it’s great to have a forum through which they can share their money-saving experiences and share tips and recommendations.”

Set up as a ‘private’ profile on the social networking site, employees receive regular updates on new retailers, competitions, most popular offers, weekly ‘top ten’ retailers and offers, and peer-to-peer discussions and recommendations for savings available through the Inchcape Employee Advantages Scheme, provided by Asperity Employee Benefits.

To join the Facebook profile, employees must request friendship and then be accepted by Inchcape’s Colleague Support Services team, who verify that the requester is an Inchcape UK employee. The profile includes a helpful information section, which explains how the scheme works and how to register, along with clear details on how to contact the scheme’s Helpdesk and Inchcape’s Colleague Support Services team.

In the 3 months since launch the page had gained nearly 140 friends without any promotion at all but through word of mouth. Feedback on the Facebook profile has been hugely positive and there has been a number of money-saving ‘good news’ stories posted by employees.

Taking a slightly different approach, IBM has developed an employee blog for a similar purpose. The IBM Rewards Community blog launched in July 09, hosting video interviews and written testimonials where IBM staff share their savings success stories and tips for their colleagues. IBM staff win a £50 prize for each of their stories that are published and this area is now vibrant and updated regularly. There are now dozens of stories on the blog where IBM employees tell each other about savings tips and ideas and the good news message that this creates has delivered measurable increases in site usage.

As IBM’s environmental strategy restricts the use of printed communications, increasingly innovative techniques must be employed to reach an email-saturated audience.

October 09 saw the launch of the IBM Rewards Twitter group – the first employee benefits site in the UK to use a daily tweet on Twitter to publicise new updates on benefits. Twitter was already in use by technology projects in IBM but this development was the first time an HR project had used the tool. Getting IBM’s non-technical support, sales and customer service staff to use the group supported IBM’s corporate goals of making new technologies core to the business, outside of the technical centres.

The Twitter group has been a huge success with thousands of employees using it for updates and 345 people becoming fully-fledged followers. The group has developed since launch to facilitate two-way dialogue between the IBM Rewards team and users, allowing discussions to be had with some of the most active IBM Rewards users. And the success of such an initiative is evident in the statistics - this group logs in 58% more frequently than the average user and achieves employee savings of 2.5 times the average (source: Asperity’s RewardManager™ system).

WHAT RESOURCES WILL YOU NEED?

You will need to dedicate some, not a lot, of your time and human resource to this kind of project. But your employee benefits provider is there to take the majority of the burden off your hands. They will have proven experience in helping organisations utilise the right methods for your workforce.

“Am I being unreasonable to be really mad that you can’t use childcare vouchers down the pub?” (Mumsnet online forum)

A quick search on parenting hub Mumsnet reveals the confusion that often surrounds a childcare voucher scheme. Luckily the above blunder was swiftly counteracted with ‘find me an Ofsted-registered pub and I’ll be there like a shot!’, but not all myths are so easily debunked. Many parents are missing out on huge annual savings of up to £933, either because they perceive signing up and the salary sacrifice aspect to be too much hassle, or they believe other myths about who the scheme applies to, and what the vouchers are used for.

Combatting these falsehoods can be as simple as communicating the range of options available for spending the vouchers to the parents at your company. Seasonal campaigns such as promotion of childcare voucher (CCV) use at Summer camps and after-school clubs in September can help. However, it is often the case that regular users of CCVs for nurseries are completely unaware of these avenues and so drop off the scheme. If a voucher provider then targets their communication of the programme to those that have cancelled, employers will see significant re-application to the scheme (and a significant boost in their NI savings!)

Whilst CCV is often a tricky subject for employers to tackle, at the very least a provider should have a savings guidance calculator for employees and point them in the direction of HMRC. Ideally a CCV provider should also run a 7 day a week helpdesk, with experts available to guide parents through the options and usage of the programme.

Indeed, in organisations where pay is a sensitive issue, it is often better to cut right to the chase and target those who are eligible. Concerns are often expressed by major retail organisations for example, that non-targeted marketing will confuse part-time employees and those on or near National Minimum Wage. However, a mistake is often made in the failure to promote the scheme at all, instead of getting the right communications to the right people – on higher earners’ payslips, for example.

In fact, effective gender-specific communication can also prove crucial in increasing the uptake of childcare vouchers amongst employees. We don’t need a landmark-scaling father in a Batman costume to remind us that we are firmly out of the dark ages in terms of the family patriarch taking responsibility for childcare.

A recent report by the Equality and Human Rights commission has confirmed that social ideals are undergoing comprehensive change, with a greater number of fathers than mothers believing it is a joint responsibility to care for the children¹.

However, a third more females than males take up childcare vouchers². Therefore, marketing the benefit to fathers specifically is an important part of any successful CCV programme to increase awareness of the benefit amongst the male contingent.

Good communication often works by challenging the misconception that only one parent in a family can take up the voucher scheme, and that a parent who doesn’t live with the children can sign up too.

Once signed up, parents are not only passionate about their own savings but are very likely to recommend CCV to friends and colleagues. A few employers, who have already worked with their provider to encourage high take up of the scheme, have begun to harness the influence of self-appointed ‘childcare champions’ in the workplace. Companies are now introducing ‘Refer a Friend’ schemes via their provider as the next stage in a successful and profitable communication strategy.

It goes without saying that offering a childcare voucher scheme goes a long way in attracting and retaining the best people in a company. And certainly not many myths revolve around ‘Ofsted-registered pubs.’ However, de-bunking the common myths that can form a self-constructed barrier to employees, whilst actively promoting this benefit to those who really need it, is the key to a successful voucher programme and the mark of a good provider.

1 EHRC (2009b). Working Better: fathers, family and work contemporary perspectives. Research summary 41. London: Equality and Human Rights Commission
2 Vital-Statistics-How-employee-demographics-affect-benefit-design.pdf on www.employeebenefits.co.uk

QUICK FACTS

Employees: 1000
Workforce profile: A mixture of retail, community and office based employees.
Highlights: Offering employees a valuable benefit during tough financial times

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The Children’s Society works tirelessly to improve the lives of children, and each employee – whether they are retail, community or office based – plays an important role in making this happen. But for an organisation where so many of its employees work remotely and at a time when everyone was feeling the financial squeeze, creating a sense of affinity with the corporate identity was proving a challenge. The Children’s Society wanted to connect with its employees and boost morale but it needed to do this in a cost effective manor.

They looked at the options available and decided upon Asperity’s Reward Gateway – not only because it enabled the charity to offer its employees a valuable discount benefit, but also because of the flexibility Reward Gateway offered. The branding flexibility as well as the opportunity to include additional benefit information would all prove to be valuable features for The Children’s Society.

The Children’s Society was undertaking a rebranding exercise at its retail stores – producing something modern and fresh. Reward Gateway was given the same branding treatment and its launch helped to support internally the rebranding campaign. Additional pages were also built into Reward Gateway showcasing additional benefit information.

This new and vibrant benefit hub made it very easy for employees to see just what benefits they enjoyed as a consequence of working for The Children’s Society and the Reward Gateway discounts themselves helped employees make their money go that little bit further.

The communication programme also helped to support the rebrand campaign. Working closely with the branding team, all guidelines were adhered to and a schedule of communications was planned around calendar themes such as Back to School, Summer Holidays and Christmas. Newsletters and posters were key tools when it came to reaching the offline workforce while the development of an intranet Forum, providing employees with the opportunity to share their saving tips and recommendations, proved equally valuable in reaching the online community.

And with extensive use of the Helpdesk, it was clear that the 7 day a week facility was an invaluable asset when it came to helping employees extract the most from the scheme.

It doesn’t stop here though. Together Asperity and The Children’s Society are taking the time to understand what the Management Information is revealing about usage and are using this analysis to help design the communication strategy going forward.

What’s next?

The aim is to identify those areas of the business where engagement still needs a boost and deploy the best communication tools available to make this happen.