9 questions to determine if it's time to reboot your employee savings program.
Letting your savings program fall by the wayside can have negative effects on your benefits package as a whole, so it’s critical to keep it in top shape. A successful employee savings program is one that engages employees, boosts satisfaction, and truly saves your workforce money.
We’ve created this guide to help you recognize if your current employee savings program is in need of a reboot. We’ll dive into nine questions that will help you better understand the state of your program and talk through what you can do to improve things you’re falling short on.
Key aspects we’ll look into are program adjustments, promotion tactics, and reporting.
58% of employees are unaware of their benefits and 63% are unsure how to access them.
1. Is your current program easy to use?
As an HR professional can attest, employees are more likely to use their benefits if it’s easy to take advantage of them.
When it comes to making sure that your employee savings program is simple and straightforward, start by considering how your team accesses it in the first place. Not every employee has access to a computer, for example, so it’s important that your program has a variety of accessibility options.
A successful program includes:
2. Does your current program offer personalization?
A recent survey found that 65% of employees value choosing their own benefits, yet only 36% felt they had a say in their benefits.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people want a say in their benefits. Simply put, we expect personalized and relevant experiences everywhere. So if your employee savings program doesn’t offer personalization, you’re likely missing the mark.
Key types of personalization include:
3. Does it reflect the diversity of your workforce?
One of the greatest benefits of employee savings programs is the ability to support the needs of a large and diverse workforce. That being said, if your deals are too narrow in scope, your employees might not find them useful.
With the American workforce diverse in income levels, stages of life, and location, it’s important that your savings program reflect that.
A few things to consider when reviewing your savings program:
4. Is it easy to administer?
While an employee savings program is a valuable part of your benefits plan, it likely won’t be the centerpiece of your offerings. Therefore, if it becomes a headache to manage, odds are it won’t receive the attention it needs to succeed.
Consider the following opportunities to ease your administrative burden and get things on track:
- Look for ways you can automate your program such as regularly sent emails to your employees reminding them of your savings program.
- Determine what self-service tools you can put in place—such as onboarding materials—so that it’s easy for employees to register and engage with their program.
- If your program is currently self-managed, consider working with a provider who can manage the program for you on your behalf.
5. Are you auto-enrolling new hires into your program?
Auto-enrolling new hires not only ensures they have knowledge of the program and how to use it, but it can also significantly increase utilization rates too. This is true not only in the employee savings program world, but across the board when it comes to employee benefits. For example, when T. Rowe Price audited the participants in its customers’ 401(k) plans, it found auto-enrolled employees were nearly twice as likely to participate vs. their self-enrolled counterparts.
Make auto-enrollment a default option for your employee savings program. Rather than waiting for your team to join, enroll them when they’re first hired and allow them to voluntarily opt out if they so choose.
T. Rowe Price Audit
Auto-enrolled members are roughly twice as active with their savings program as self-enrolled members.
6. Are you getting new employees onboarded efficiently?
When it comes to getting new hires up and running on your employee savings program, the first seven days are the most important. Employees that utilize the benefit early in their tenure are more likely to use it again in the future.
We found that more than half of all users that go on to use our platform register within the first seven days that they have access. Clearly, that initial rush of excitement is powerful and isn’t to be overlooked. Make sure you have a plan to get new hires up and running as quickly as possible.
- Adding it to your onboarding process.
- Promoting your program wherever your employees communicate regularly such as an intranet, digital signage in the office, or an online communication tool.
- Sending an automated email sequence.
7. Are you getting new employees onboarded efficiently?
Benefits communication is a persistent challenge even for the most sophisticated organizations. As a result, according to Ameritas, more than 80% of employees don’t fully understand their benefits options, leading to many benefits going unused. Particularly for larger organizations, one of the greatest challenges is the variety of channels through which employees communicate on a daily basis. For example, many organizations have workers scattered across the country in a variety of in-person and virtual roles.
When communicating with employees, make sure your approach accounts for the various realities your team may face. For employees at a desk, email is likely the easiest and most cost-effective way to communicate. For employees on their feet, consider traditional channels like flyers and monitor displays. Don’t forget to add custom URLs or QR codes to make accessing the program easy!
8. Are you capitalizing on seasonal promotions?
To drive maximum engagement, aim to capitalize on seasonal events as opportunities to promote your employee savings program. A few examples of seasonal events to take advantage of include holidays such as Independence Day, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and Black Friday, amongst many others. In other words, capitalize on times of the year when employees are likely to be spending more money and would appreciate a discount.
Use seasonal events to drive program awareness and adoption. Consider developing a clear roadmap of when your employee savings program could help your employees most and how you will promote it during these periods of time. To make things easier, find an employee savings provider that consults and provides resources for you to promote seasonal promotions.
9. Are you reporting on the right KPIs (or even reporting at all)?
No matter how well designed and promoted your employee savings program might be, it’s still important to ensure you’re effectively tracking and reporting on its efficacy. Doing so pays off in two ways:
- It provides the data needed to optimize your onboarding and engagement strategies over time.
- It helps demonstrate the success of your program.
If you aren’t taking KPIs into account, you’re significantly reducing your odds of success. Measuring your employee savings program’s direct role in employee satisfaction or engagement can be challenging since it’s one part of a larger benefits package. That being said, when you dig a little deeper there a variety of data points to quantify the success of your program.
Utilization
Indicative of employee interest
Savings
Quantifiable look at how much money you’re saving employees
Top Deals
Helps optimize and shape future decisionsNow that you’ve taken into account the different considerations necessary to determine if you need a program reboot, it’s time to take action.
If this exercise brought to your attention bigger gaps in your offering, it might be time to consider switching to a different employee savings program provider. Making the switch will not only affect the success of your benefits, but it will help employees save more money.
Find the right savings program for your organization today.
PerkSpot is a trusted employee savings platform that provides unbeatable, personalized savings in 25+ categories. Our approach is simple, inspiring others to love where they work by offering the steepest, most intentional discounts on thousands of reputable brands. From local deals to big-name brands, the savings opportunities are endless
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