How to use insights to optimise your benefits strategy

The one-size-fits-all approach to employee benefits is long gone!

We may sound like a broken record, but we really do bang the drum when it comes to that saying. Today it’s all about personalisation and customisation, catering your benefits package to the unique needs and preferences of each employee.

But how do you unlock the full potential of your colleagues and build a deeper level of engagement and understanding?

With reporting, of course!

It’s all well and good thinking you know what your popular benefits are, which benefits employees are engaging with, but ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. And when it comes to that pudding, we offer a variety of different options to help satisfy your taste buds.

With Zest, you can get a truly holistic overview of your benefits, helping you to make the important decisions that not only have a positive impact on your employees, but on your talent attraction/retention too.

Here, we look at how partnering with Zest can optimise your benefits strategy, and just how it will put employees at the very heart of the decisions you make.

Within our Zest technology we have a fantastic suite of tools that can give employers the information they need on who has taken up what, which benefits at what levels and with which family members are included, just to name a few examples.

This gives people teams a fantastic insight into what is popular on the platform. It will also provide some of the key factors that are important to employees.

Our management insight functionality also enables you to drill down into different demographics, including:

• Age
• Gender
• Department

This enables you to understand more about the demographic of your employees, and when picking up on particular benefits, you’re able to really interrogate the data you have to understand more about your offering.

Your data won’t necessarily tell you why benefits are important, but it will give you a healthy understanding of what is attractive to your colleagues in different categories and segments, ultimately meaning you can engage with them to ensure you both ‘benefit’ from your offering.

Ah, now you’re talking our language. Picture the scene…

Let’s say you have a number of offices throughout the country. You offer a Gym Membership scheme to your employees, and the take-up from colleagues in your London office is fantastic.

However, your Portsmouth office doesn’t seem as health conscious as your central hub, and take up numbers for the sunny South Coast location (you can tell our author is from there) are poor.

That could be because of a number of issues (location of the gyms, cost or demographic of staff for example), but how can you resolve this?

Through analysing these actionable insights, you as the employer can filter through and work with the findings. You can discover whether employees of a certain age are selecting the benefit, or whether individuals from particular departments are choosing to work out through their employee benefits platform.

From there, you can send out personalised and tailored communications. Perhaps it’s a knowledge issue, and your employees in a certain office aren’t aware of the benefit or of the gym location. This is your chance to provide them with all of the information necessary in the form of an email. You don’t need to don your flat cap and do your best Del Boy selling on a marketplace technique, but it’s worth really pushing the benefits of this perk to employees.

If that doesn’t have an impact, you can then look to work on employee surveys and understand what else could be at play here. Is it a lifestyle issue? Is it to do with finances or the time of shift people are working? Perhaps you have a different concentration of male/female employees that are taking on the benefit.

All of these insights are available to you and will provide all of the information you need to understand the what and the whys, and make an impactful change to better improve your benefits offering.

Let us break Zest’s insight ability down even more…

Benefit spend

Benefit Spend will allow you to access in-depth analysis on the monthly employee spend and employer cost of benefits.

With Zest, you can use a number of filters to determine which insights you want to explore, and a data selector, with the ability to include Employer NI Savings’ in the charts and a portal currency selector.

This provides high-level key statistical information, such as

• Total employee spend
• Total employer cost
• Average spend across all benefits
• Estimated employer NI savings

You will also have access to the monthly spend by portal, demographic and benefit category.

Portal Usage

The great thing about actionable insights is they give you the perfect outlook on the engagement. Our Portal Usage insights allow you to better understand what employees are interacting with when using the application.

Through Zest, you can view key portal usage statistics, providing high-level clarity on:

• Number of employer portals included in the page data,
• Total number of employees,
• Percentage of employees logged in,
• The number of first time users,
• The total sessions,
• Average sessions per user,
• The average session per day,
• Peak sessions (including the day the peak occurred)

Take-up summary

With everything hosted on one platform, you get a really in-depth insight of your benefits package and what exactly employees are engaging with and taking up, providing the ability to filter by employee demographic, benefit categories, eligibility and more.

Your pages provide filters allowing you to further analyse and delve into your data. These include a data selector, employees (allowing you to select only those who are eligible or all employees) and a data format (giving you the option to view the data as number statistic counts or percentages).

When using Zest, this also includes:

• Total employee count
• Total selections
• Average take-up (represented as a percentage)
• Average number of benefit per employee

With this, you’ll be able to understand what’s popular and perhaps the benefits that you can consider replacing should they not be having the desired outcome you as an employer wished.

At Zest, we’re championing a new era of employee engagement through technology, and a key factor of being able to do that is through reporting on your data. With our platform, we’re building a future where employees are at the heart of every decision and organisations understand that employee engagement is not a one-time thing but an ongoing activity.

To find out how you can put reporting at the heartbeat of your employee benefit decision making, book a demo with Zest today.