When it comes to designing employee benefits, one size doesn’t fit all. Brands have long understood the importance of segmenting customers to understand their needs, values, and preferences. Yet, they often treat their employees like they’re one group with one set of requirements.

Why should employees expect anything less than the customers they serve? 

The way we see it, employees are as important as customers - they are consumers of the workplace - and it’s time employers look at them through a customer experience lens.

Current approaches to employee benefits.

Employee benefits are often bought ‘off the shelf’. Companies partner with a tech platform, which administers the scheme on their behalf.

Workplace benefits are the best they’ve ever been, and companies like Juno are paving the way to tackling the choice problem, making employee benefits more meaningful and interactive.

Offering employees autonomy through a choice of attractive benefits is a step in the right direction. 

But when it comes down to it, a menu of choice is still a one-size, transactional approach to employee benefits, insufficient on its own to create loyalty and develop long standing relationships.

Employees today, millennials especially, want to feel seen, understood, and appreciated by their employer. And they want a choice of appealing options based on their needs, wants, and preferences.

They’re looking for something altogether more personal.

Personalisation: why choice alone isn’t the answer.

In 2019, KPMG reported that retention was 36% higher in organisations with highly engaged employees, they outperformed competitors by 147%, and those investing in employee experience reported four times higher profitability.

The takeaway: when your people feel seen, valued, and understood, performance skyrockets. 

An engaged staff team needs a culture of trust and empathy and must feel secure in the knowledge that they won’t be embarrassed, rejected, or humiliated for speaking up, a concept known as psychological safety. Without these cultural foundations, employees lack the courage to be open and honest about their circumstances and pressures beyond work. 

For example, Helen would likely choose not to disclose her debilitating menopausal symptoms without a psychologically safe environment. Like 59% of women over 45 in the workplace, her symptoms negatively affect her working life.

Codesigning a tailored solution like flexible working hours to accommodate disrupted sleep or providing a better-ventilated workspace empowers her to continue doing her job and do it better than she’s currently able. A personal and infinitely more valuable benefit than even the best benefits package.

Holistic leadership and tailored, compassionate solutions create employee loyalty and mean employees come to work as their ‘best selves’ - ending the corporate tradition of leaving your troubles at the door.

A holistic approach to employee experience. 

True, effective personalisation requires an in-depth analysis of your team, functions, and company.

Design thinking is a process of understanding a whole system by taking it apart, identifying its pain points, and rebuilding it better than before. The key to its success is keeping your employees at the centre of the process.

Design thinking tells us that corporate culture doesn’t create the necessary environment for employees to think about what they need and want from their benefits, let alone know how to ask for it. So it falls to a company’s people and culture function to start these conversations and facilitate their team’s journey of self-discovery. 

Our experience confirms that personalisation can’t be used effectively by HR alone. The HR function is too far removed from an employee’s everyday experience. 

A successful personalisation agenda needs a structured approach applied from the ground up, which means that managers need to understand personalisation to help people access everything they need to do their best work.

Meaningful one-to-ones: the first step to personalisation.

We’ve already said that psychologically safe workplaces require a culture of empathy, honesty and trust. A supportive environment encourages employees to share and disclose details of their personal lives that may be affecting their performance and productivity.

One way to encourage a culture of sharing is to show your team that you value your relationship through a weekly, immoveable one-to-one meeting:

• Give your employees your full, uninterrupted attention. Be curious and ask open questions.

• Give them the autonomy to own the agenda.

• Give them the space to build a mutual connection and create a more genuine adult relationship.

A mindset shift for managers.

As a manager, inviting personal disclosures of this type may well be a new, alien experience. Many intentionally keep their people at arm’s length to remain objective while guiding them to achieve results.

However, without context, how can we effectively and fairly judge a situation? 

Take Helen above. 

If (like 85% of women) Helen hadn’t felt supported enough to disclose her condition to her manager and her symptoms caused her to make a mistake, the consequences could be severe and unjust. 

But by making her feel safe to disclose, and implementing personalised solutions, Helen’s mistake could be avoided, or its likelihood significantly reduced.

Support for managers: your personalised solution.

At fluxfutures, we practice what we preach. We know your needs are uniquely yours, so we won’t pitch you a one-size-fits-all solution.

Your managers may need a group coaching programme explaining personalisation principles, mindset and behaviours, or how to have better one-to-one conversations.

Your employees might need a one-off workshop helping them to explore what they want from their employee benefits or how to ask for what they need.

You might not know precisely what it is you need just yet. And that’s OK.

Personalisation is a process.

Personalisation in employee experience means applying curiosity to attract, curate and engage your people, and over time, build loyalty.

Personalisation is a process of:

• Learning about your employees.

• Building a culture of empathy, honesty, and trust.

• Embracing your employees’ whole selves to benefit from them at their best.

• Applying personalised solutions to improve their employee experience.

• Providing attractive, relevant benefits that change with your employees’ needs.  

An engaged workforce is happier and more productive. A loyal one is stable.