A Flexible Employee Benefits Platform is a term widely used but often misused. It can describe all sorts of types of arrangements between the employer and employee. Most employees have some sort of flexibility in their working hours, terms and conditions as standard.
It is not uncommon for an employee to have an ability to contribute more funds into their pension pot, take unpaid annual holidays or even buy products directly through the employer at a discounted rate.
But a Flexible Employee Benefits Platform allows for an employee and the employer to draw a proper agreement with an allowance given for the employee to spend on benefits (like extra holidays and flexitime operations) by the business from a pre-defined menu of options.
Because there is flexibility in the platform, usually the employee is given an option to overspend. They may wish to take an extra week’s annual leave to cover that period when they take the family over to Disneyworld in Florida, and for that, they can accept a reduced pay packet that month to offset the extra time taken on annual leave. Employee benefits have always been around. Many years ago, they were termed as “perks”, all too often reserved for the middle management and upwards section of the workforce.
These days, employee benefits are often allocated across the entire workforce but there are still administration and awareness problems. A recent survey at one company showed that a mere 25 per cent of all employees valued the benefits on offer. Even with the fact that in many cases the value of these benefits amounted to as much as 20 per cent of the annual salary.
The Advantages of a Flexible Employee Benefits Platform
As far as the employer is concerned, there are two advantageous factors in employing this program into the workplace: the nuts and bolts of the hard business and the human factor (the softer approach and the one that promotes good feelings and high morale among the workforce).
Good morale in the workplace has always seen many benefits. The increase in productivity, reduced sickness time and absenteeism being just a couple of the factors. Then the business will also likely get a lower staff turnover and mean you’re likely to keep your best staff so it helps a lot with staff retention too.
A Flexible Employee Benefits Platform can also be expanded to include things like Tax and National Insurance efficiency, controlling costs, employee choice, gym membership, health insurance premiums, changing hours, recruitment aid, improved retention and increasing motivation.
So, this allows your business to fine tune the benefits offered to each employee so that they are much happier with the benefits that they are getting as they are so well matched to that employee. So, this will result in much happier staff and that will likely result in better performance and a lower staff turnover, which all means better business and so these flexible employee benefits can pay off a lot for your business.
