Source: Bit.Leave 

Get your people involved in your benefits design process 

Brett says we shouldn’t rely on eNPS and surveys that often use closed ended questions (unhelpful) and can enable confirmation bias. Instead, you should try: 

1. Conduct employee interviews with ‘super users’ – let the active people voice their opinion. 
2. If required to use surveys, use open ended questions – get people to draw upon their stories. 
3. Card sorting exercises – get a bunch of frequent program users to rank what’s most important to them. Create a few columns for priority levels (low to high), and then employees can drag the different benefit elements (wellness, time off, progression) into the priority columns to add their context. People love having input and they love to drag and drop things on a screen! Check out Kardsort or miro. 

From here, you can use their feedback and ranked priorities to build your business case for a revised benefits program employees actually want, and work out what’s possible for your budget. 

Rolling out your new program for maximum adoption 

Your total rewards program won’t become a raging success just by hitting publish and letting your employees ‘have at it.’ Brett says there are a few key things you can do to introduce your new program for maximum adoption. 

1. Split test or stage your benefits release 

If you have a large employee base, you want to avoid rolling it out to everyone at once. Instead, test with smaller groups first, so you can gather feedback and identify product champions along the way. 

Set up a rolling release and tell your employees where it is going first and why, and where it’s going next. Brett says that the benefit in being overly communicative like this, is you can create anticipation and generate buy in.  

2. Include fast feedback loops 

Have a process in place to ensure you can gather feedback within the first 24 hours of launch, within 7 days and again in 28 days. Map it out and have the follow up schedule booked to track how people are experiencing things. 

You want to catch any bugs or teething problems right away before you have a thousand employees logging in and logging complaints that need to be managed on a grand scale. Don’t assume people will bring you problems. If it becomes too hard – people move on to other tasks. Proactively seeking feedback ensures you get quality data to guide

you. 

3. Make it universal & inclusive 

Sometimes we see job ads with far too many benefits listed, only for the new hire to feel duped once they’re inside because there’s a long list of criteria to gain access to what was promised. This isn’t a good approach. 

Instead, Brett says to keep your benefits simple and universal for maximum appeal and uptake. Too many conditions and too much segregation will only turn off your employees. 

Summary 

To increase the successfulness of your package, you need to be thinking about tracking and measuring your return on investment. A successful benefits program is one that employees use and enjoy regularly. So, make sure you’re creating an enticing offer by bringing them into the fold early, and allowing them to guide your design process. 

Watch the full webinar replay here 

About Brett 

From military special operations, recruitment, HR, and fast-growth tech start-ups, Brett has lived and experienced the impacts of burnout and churn both at a personal and organisational level. He now devotes his time to helping companies build better benefits to reduce excess leave liabilities, burnout and churn as the CEO & Co-Founder of Bit.Leave.