Managing the future in an uncertain world

As businesses begin emerging from the worst of the COVID-19 impact, they need to make sure that their people are in good shape to cope and thrive. The challenge for many is how to engage employees, ensuring that motivation and morale are high so that efficiency levels can bounce back to pre-COVID-19 levels.

Benefits platform

One way of ensuring that a business keeps up with its competition is to modernise the way it delivers its reward programme to its employees. The best way during the pandemic is through using a benefits platform, that not only provides the recognition tools to support staff engagement, but one that also provides the full range of employer funded benefits that are needed and supports staff communication.

The benefits industry has traditionally shaped its services to cater for large employers employing thousands of workers, resulting in complex flexible benefit platform solutions. These flex solutions require expensive IT time and resource and become long term contractual commitments and so lack value for money for smaller businesses. Companies like Bravo Benefits have come up with an affordable solution utilising the growth of digitisation.

Growth of digitisation: what does it mean for employee benefits?

Cloud based technology means that employers can access easy to use and affordable platform solutions. These offer agile, digitally enabled tools, which are easier to use than flex, as they don't require staff selection windows. These new platforms offer employers a more cost-effective way to move forward with their reward and benefits delivery and should make employers who have expensive current flex arrangements look at shifting away from these, too easy to implement cloud-based technologies.

The new entrants like Bravo Benefits offer digital benefit platforms that are quick and easy to set up and don't involve complex and costly IT configurations. Importantly they provide all the engagement and communication tools that employers need as well as a full range of benefits including importantly, health and well-being as well as reward and recognition.

As a result, these new entrants are quickly finding ways to improve the reach of benefit provision with UK businesses and are working hard to act as a bridge between the old world of flex platforms and the new world of agile simple affordable solutions.

These new solutions have a wide range of tools and services available to them that are focused on helping businesses adapt to the current pandemic climate, where employers are seeking ways of keeping up morale, encouraging worker collaboration, and driving a can-do culture. This can be against a myriad of employee roles and staff demographics to cater to.

For employers it is about adding value to an employee's total rewards package by offering tangible everyday benefits that enhance their employee's lifestyles.

What services should I expect?

Recognition is one of the best methods of improving work motivation and employee engagement with tools like gift cards and retail gift vouchers that help salaries to go that much further. Tools that allow peer to peer recognition rather than just top down, say thank you more generally to each other, but also so managers could acknowledge that extraordinary work.

Access to health and wellbeing is also fully supported by the new platforms given the increased demand for these services because of the pandemic, with common benefits including virtual GP services, employee assistance programmes, health information and support. The role that these products play in future is growing in importance, as employees will be focused on leading healthier lives post the pandemic. New services such as health coaching, on-site health screening, risk and workplace assessments, and occupational health are likely to increase in importance as the focus shifts to managing health resilience, in a world where social distancing becomes a core feature of working and social life.

These continue to be extremely challenging times for individuals, families, and businesses. The benefits industry has a key role to play in supporting employers and their employees through the crisis and the recovery, as employers of all sizes embark on the digital transformation of their businesses, to become more agile, responsive and connected enterprises.

Wojciech Dochan

Managing Director, Bravo Benefits

Provider of the SmartHive Platform

Smart Hive is an integrated, cost effective employee benefits platform that provides your employees with access to all their health and wellbeing benefits in one place. Talk to a member of our team today or book your very own demonstration.

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