How to revolutionise your employee engagement

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

While we at Zest appreciate you might not be familiar with Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw, we couldn’t help but relay a quote which hits home when it comes to employee engagement!

It’s all well and good having a fantastic employee benefits proposition, but you shouldn’t expect your people to know the ins and outs of your offering. You need to familiarise them with it, you need to educate them about it, and more importantly, you need to engage them with it.

Forget the old ‘build it and they will come’ mantra, in today’s wonderful world of employee benefits, colleagues require you to go above and beyond to champion a new era of employee engagement via your technology.

Don’t be under the impression that having an employee benefits platform is job done! The technology and benefits you offer are only half the battle. The way you engage with your employees, for a matter of fact, is the real pièce de resistance.

Before you charge into your new revolution of employee engagement, first you need to tackle the elephant in the room!

The difference between what employers consider good and what employees consider good is certainly causing a disconnect.

With employee expectations continuing to mount, our research has found that 45% of employees believe that their employee benefits package is inadequate.

This is surprising, when you consider 48% of businesses have confirmed that they have increased the investment in their benefits offering in the last 12 months. With employee benefits a huge contributor towards talent attraction and retention, getting it right is vital to your overall proposition, and ultimately, successful employee engagement.

After all, 42% of those surveyed by Zest said that a good benefits package is the most important thing they look for in employment, with 67% of 18-34 year olds admitting they would walk away from their current job if a prospective employer offered them a better benefits package.

So, to start, it’s vital you listen to what your people want and get it right. We bang the drum with this saying, but the one-size-fits-all approach to employee benefits is long gone. The first step towards defining a quality employee engagement proposition is to personalise your benefits package.

After all, 62% of employees would happily use their benefits package more if it was tailored to their needs.

Get that right, and engaging your employees will be easier than a Sunday morning.

Despite the disconnect, the future world of work, and more specifically employee benefits, looks highly promising.

Some good progress has been made when it comes to the employee benefits landscape, with employers better recognising the value of employee benefits, investing in their offering and aligning with their employees on future workplace initiatives.

There is certainly room for improvement! While employers seem to be meeting general demands, the starkest disconnect surrounds levels of personalisation and communication employees are expecting – nine out of ten (87%) employees believe that information surrounding their benefits is clearly communicated, yet just half (50%) of employees know exactly what their employer offers.

But how can employers solve this, and revolutionise the way you engage with your people?

Employee benefits technology can equip employers with the right tools to adapt to the changing and individual demands within its workforce and deliver a personalised employee experience.

Powered by innovative, automated technology, Zest works seamlessly with both existing and new benefits packages and can be configured start to finish within a matter of days, to meet the unique needs and preferences of individual employees, ensuring that benefits are as easy to administer as they are to access, providing value to employers and employees alike.

Our findings clearly support this fact. A quarter (24%) of HR leaders said managing benefits is a manual and tedious task, a fifth (18%) said they don’t currently have access to detailed data on take-up of specific benefits and a staggering 82% said employee benefits technology would make their job significantly easier.

By offering insights to understand how employees are using their benefits, employers can better understand how their needs can be best met, enjoy the flexibility of being able to adapt this offering accordingly, know how to directly improve their communications and employee engagement, and ensure that their benefits package is getting the best return on investment.

Using this data to provide targeted communications with employees based on age, gender or team for example, can further promote benefit take-up which contributes to an improved overall employee proposition, making employees more likely to be engaged and stay with a company.

Benefits alone are unlikely to keep someone at a job – however, it’ll certainly help. With a large proportion of employees admitting that they’d be willing to walk away from their current job if another prospective employer offered them a better benefits package, the importance of employee benefits and the right technology to deliver this cannot be overstated.

As the old saying goes, communication is key, and that’s no different when it comes to employee engagement!

Remember, your pay and benefits are only one part of your broader employee value proposition. You need a platform that also enables employees to understand your broader proposition, particularly those elements that are less transactional and build engagement and loyalty. This is where you can stand out from the crowd and really develop your employee/employer relationship.

Make sure you focus on

• Your people policies, wellbeing tools and guidance, community activities, clubs and activities, learning resources, social events etc.
• Ensuring your content regarding your employee proposition remains current and fresh.

At Zest, we empower employers to create better workplaces by offering personalised benefits, effectively communicating the broader employee value proposition and recognising the contribution of their teams.

Our platform is designed to make benefits highly engaging and automate all scheme administration, ensuring a seamless experience for both employers and employees.

Our engagement model

With Zests engagement module, you’ve got some of the most powerful internal communications tools at your fingertips.

Our tools let you create personalised email campaigns in just a few clicks so you can share announcements with your team.

Our engagement groups feature lets you target specific employee groups, so your messages stay relevant and effective. Plus, you can track open and click through rates for every email, giving you insights into how far your message is reaching or whether it’s driving.

This helps you build a culture where everyone feels valued and informed.

We also allow you to set up automated emails for any occasion, whether that’s opening or closing benefit Windows, sending recognitions or handling auto enrollment. You can customise the design of every email to match your brand and tone of voice, including images and visual elements, making each message engaging in relevant. Each email can also be personalised with dynamic details from your employee records like their name, role or any customer information.

Our Content Manager

Content Manager lets you create target and schedule runoff campaigns for specific announcements. You’ll get valuable insights into your campaigns effectiveness, including open rates, click rates, and bounce notifications, so you know your messages are getting through.

With the engagement groups feature, you can target emails to specific groups using our powerful rules engine, create groups based on criteria like age, location, grade or benefit selections. For example, you might target head office employees who haven’t joined the cycle to work scheme to promote an upcoming roadshow for your sustainable.

By empowering your communications team to send targeted, personalised messages to engage your people, Zest becomes more than just a benefits platform.

A real game changer

We believe we can provide a vital cog in the wheel for employee engagement, making benefits engaging, personalised, and simple, providing the best employee benefit experience on the market.

Other benefit platforms require you to use their “services” (costly/slow) to get information published and updated. Our content manager makes it simple to create engaging content, with images, videos, documents, links, carousels etc.

By harmonising employee understanding and engagement, you can better understand your people and access data on demand, in the format you need. We allow users to create custom reports to gain better insights, allowing them to communicate in an effective manner and meet the growing demands of their people.

And there’s no hidden fees, no consultancy costs or third-party admin services, we allow you to manage your people and company content with minimal effort.

Book a demo with our team today.