Research has found that 18 percent of employers fail to encourage workers to use their employee benefits.
These employers leave it to employees to initiate the use of benefits themselves instead of actively encouraging staff to use the benefits available to them, Grid has found.
“Getting the right benefits for staff is a huge investment for any company, so it does not make any sense that a fifth of employers seem to be letting them gather dust on a shelf, metaphorically speaking,” said Katharine Moxham, spokesperson for Grid. “Making practical and effective use of employee benefits needs to be a priority for all businesses.”
In the competition for talent, employee benefits can be a major point of difference when trying to attract the best candidates.
But this advantage can be lost, Grid warned, if an employer’s enthusiasm for benefits does not extend beyond the recruitment process to support retention.
Employers need to be consistent, and where employee benefits play an important part in the recruitment process, that attention to benefits needs to be sustained, the group risk body said.
When employees are left to sign up for employee benefits under their own steam, they are less likely to fully understand everything that is on offer and therefore less likely to make full use of it.
Grid added that employee benefits that are not used, or not used fully, will be the first to be cut when budgets are tight.
Moxham said: “In the event of budget constraints, any employee benefit that has low take-up rates is at risk of being dropped, which is such a loss to employees but also to HR teams who will have worked hard to set out the case for the benefit in the first place, as well as selecting the right provider.
“Recruits are often most open to hearing about employee benefits programmes so employers should strike while the iron is hot with this group. However, employers wishing to improve utilisation may need to regularly revise their approach amongst longer standing employees to get traction.
“Encouraging the take-up of employee benefits really is a virtuous circle as employees who have a positive experience will also start to communicate the advantages to colleagues too. While employee-to-employee communication is a vital part of the utilisation jigsaw, employers should never become complacent and should always have a strategy in place to encourage take-up.”
