How to manage complex benefit schemes

Employee benefits don’t have to be complicated!

They don’t have to be hard to understand, nor do they have to be confusing. In fact, there’s no reason for them to be complex at all.

At Zest, our teams go above and beyond to make them as simple as pie, or if you’re a music fan, as ‘easy as 1-2-3’.

We live and breathe employee benefits, and implementing your benefit schemes is, as you’d expect, our bread and butter. But how do we simplify this? How do Zest configure everything to make your platform a success?

Here, we take you through some of the complexities around benefit schemes, and how our professional and innovative approach can make handling your requirements easier than a walk in the park.

We like to think that nothing’s too complex for us when it comes to benefits.

But, while our Project Consultants and Product Managers can turn their hand to almost anything, we understand there may be HR & Benefit teams out there who are concerned their scheme may be too complex, and that it may seriously impact the time taken to implement everything.

That’s not the case, but here are a few stereotypical complexities often found in the wonderful world of benefits.

• Bigger companies who have varying eligibility rules for the same benefit
• Pension complexities, including contribution levels
• Different levels of funding for benefits such as Private Medical Insurance

We could go into detail about our implementation process, but our handy ‘How to implement Zest’s benefits platform in your organization’ will cover everything you need to know and more.

For benefit schemes, be it complex or simple, our fantastic team will hold a workshop with your key decision makers, going through every detail until we’ve established what it is and what is required. From the type of benefits to the number you’re offering, we’ll leave no stone left unturned. Let’s not also forget, we always want to know what success looks like to you!

From that meeting, we’ll define the rules of your benefits scheme. This will involve separate sessions (this could be with payroll, HR or even benefit providers) to understand each part of the scheme we’re implementing, how each employee will see each benefit and what they’re entitled to.

The data

Once we’ve established the important details, it’s time to focus on data.

We’ll feed everything into our scheme documents, which in turn will feed into the portal. It doesn’t matter if it’s coming from an existing flex platform or whether it’s completely manual, we would have established during one of our workshop sessions how to simplify it.

We’ll also be able to create a form of automation for your data. Whether your integration be through API or our purpose-built scheduling, our system provides real-time data, meaning no manual processes which inevitably saves time and admin headaches. You can build your own rules, automating which benefits are available to each employee based on factors like job grade, location, salary or a change in the employee’s circumstances.

What’s more, the automative process eliminates human error, with the data flowing direct from the HR system, through Zest to the benefit providers. With no human interaction, and no filtering, it becomes incredibly accurate.

Finally, we can effortlessly connect with the HR, payroll and benefits providers you’re already using.

Just like all the other benefits you can manage with Zest, you can create rules that control who has access to each pension scheme. You can set how much your maximum employer contribution will be for groups of employees based on factors like their role, length of service, location and salary too.

Zest can also manage your auto-enrolment compliance needs, including postponement and auto-enrolment notices, and confirmation of opting in, opting out or cyclical re-enrolment.

Employees can easily flex their pension contributions up or down, and see the impact any changes will make to their take-home pay and their tax and NI savings. Employees can also use SMART salary sacrifice to increase their pension contributions from just their NI savings and keep their take-home pay the same.

So, why not simplify your benefit scheme?

Remember, our integrations save you time, reduce your admin, and keep your data up-to-date, everywhere. And you don’t need to log in to loads of different systems, just Zest.

To see how we can Zestify your employee benefits offering, book a demo today.