Scheme Design? Sounds fancy!
My friends and family often ask me “how’s work at the moment?” followed by “Sorry, what is it you do again?”
I understand, benefits are such a niche within HR, it’s easy to get confused. However, it got me thinking, our team has an even more specific function within Employee Benefits. So, how can I explain my job to friends, family, even clients in the best way?
If we haven’t met before, my name is Ruta and I'm a consultant for the Scheme Design Team. Our mission is to lead the future of employee benefits. "What is it we do exactly?", I hear you ask. We aim to provide insight to clients on their employee benefits strategy and support them with benefit projects.
First of all, we look inside
We want to understand you and your employees, to ensure that any service delivered is tailored to your needs. To do this, we gather employee feedback. We listen to employee opinions on benefits and understand how and why they engage with their benefits.
We also meet with your wider reward and leadership teams to conduct strategy workshops. We help define your reward strategy and align it to organisational culture and values.
Working in Harmony
For some organisations, they need to align several benefit offerings and understand the individual employee impact. We call these harmonisation projects. We support you by providing the design and financial impact for you and your employees. This means you can weigh up all the options and choose the harmonisation scenario that most aligns to your priorities and culture.
Once we have looked inside, we conduct a benefits review and provide recommendations for change. This process highlights where improvements can be made to the benefits offering. We consider factors such as workforce needs, diversity and inclusion and market relevance.
At this stage, we look at your competitors, your industry sector and the general market, to give you insight into the current trends in the market. Providing you with an overview of what your competitors are currently doing.
You might be thinking, "Wouldn't I find this on Glassdoor?"
The simple answer – yes, Glassdoor can provide some insight into employee benefits. Yet, often employers will not get the full view and complexity of the benefits offering. Information such as; what direction is the sector moving in and how the findings are relevant to your organisation.
After all – we have seen that “one size fits all” rarely rings true.
Then, we look outside
And we track progess
Once clients make changes and improvements to their benefits scheme, they often ask us – “What’s next?"
At this point, we set goals aimed at what you want to achieve with your benefits scheme. We then track those goals with you throughout the year. We work together to ensure the benefits offering is relevant, sustainable and market aligned. This option suits our strategic clients who want to build on their scheme over a three to five year period.