Bath Business News’ weekly Expert Panel continues with Iain Fox, employee benefits director of growing Bath financial services firm Fidelius, explaining how the art of clear communication can yield benefits to both your firm and your staff
If your department or company has particular goals, then conveying those goals clearly and consistently is absolutely crucial if you are to have buy-in from staff and ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction.
And what’s true of company goals is also true of staff benefits and for staff wellbeing.
Your company might have one of the best employee benefit packages and pension schemes in your industry, but if you are not communicating it to staff then you are missing a trick. Rather like the situation that can arise if company goals aren’t frequently and clearly articulated, you can miss out on a workforce that’s feeling motivated, driven and cared for. In addition, boosting employee engagement with your company pension scheme and employee benefits through the use of timely, targeted and easily comprehensible methods of communication can improve the return you get on the budget you have put in to your benefits programme.
Ensuring your members of staff understand and value their employee benefits is part of the HR jigsaw that every company faces. But while it is a common issue, the ways of addressing it are not common to all. Companies use different means of communication, and a large, established firm will require a different approach to a smaller business that is in the relatively early stages of development.
Moreover, not every member of staff responds in the same way. Some will be pro-active and explore the benefits options available to them under their own steam. Others will need to have matters more explicitly stated to them. And there will be some in the middle.
I was recently fortunate enough to be the speaker at a breakfast event held by Small Business Focus at Carluccio’s in Milsom Place. This group does excellent work for small firms across Bath and North East Somerset, and it was informative and engaging to hear of the employee benefits issues they are dealing with. But, clearly, the issues those smaller businesses face – and the way they communicate them – are very different to those of a multi-national firm.
At Fidelius, we understand this and tailor our employee benefits communication programmes accordingly. In addition, we deliver messages in different ways depending on the different demographic groups within a firm.
We do this by segmenting a workforce into different sub-groups which reflect employees’ age and where they are in life. By breaking your staff down into such groups – new graduates, young parents or those with no computer access at work, for example – we can create a bespoke employee engagement strategy.
Fidelius offers face-to-face support to individuals within firms, but we also understand that the impact of a company’s existing channels of communication – such as its intranet, induction programme and maybe even something as simple as its notice-board – need to maximised.
For more information on how Fidelius can help you improve your staff’s engagement with employee benefits, please call us on 0845 241 6500 or visit www.fidelius.co.uk.
