A profitable business requires a motivated and highly performance oriented team. Thus, it is critical for a company to recognize such high performers and retain them for the longer time. However, in reality, staff turnover is a nightmare that haunts most organizations as they struggle to keep their employees stick for long. A prime reason could be the failure to provide them the benefits that matter to them. While traditionally most companies focused on monetary rewards to keep their staff going, people today need more than that but many companies either fail to realize this or fail to make such provisions. 

However, the trends are changing!

Beyond the traditional modus operandi of attracting and retaining employees with fat salary packages, companies are now realizing the importance of giving non-monetary benefits as well. Instead of giving them an increase in salaries, the focus has shifted to building retention strategies that target a complete spectrum of employee benefits ranging from discount schemes to health plans, employee assistance programs, and more. A complete bunch of monetary and non-monetary, tangible and intangible benefits make a complete package that serves as a good employee retention strategy for these organizations.

Employee benefits add to the feel good factor that keeps employees engaged, loyal and productive. According to a 2015 survey conducted by Glassdoor, 79% of the employees looked for additional benefits other than the pay increases. The tendency is even higher in females and young employees. 

A range of employee benefits that organizations provide to their employees for retention include discount schemes, children vouchers, cycle to work, car pool, car park, mobile phones, employee assistance, health plans, saving on household expenditure, online voucher codes, high street discounts, reloadable gift cards, SMS vouchers and cash back offers, corporate gym memberships, health club discounts,  and more.

While the provision of these benefits can be a highly influential, managing them could be a challenging task especially with large organizations that have a huge number of employees working for them. Thus, in order to resolve the complications, companies often resort to technology solutions like mobile applications and web applications. For instance, analytics are run on employee data that deliver insights on employee motivation. These insights can help organizations formulate strategies for delivering employee benefits that give best results for employee retention. Digitization of employee management systems for their retention provides a list of benefits that can help a company achieve impressive growth. These include:

Better Efficiency 

Managing enrollment and administration becomes quicker and easier by automating administrative functions. 

Productivity Boost

With the digitization of processes, employees receive benefits of convenience and ease of working. Their work live is simplified by digital tools leading to increase in their productivity.

Compliance and Risk Reduction

With benefits listed online through a management system, it becomes easy to comply with rules as well as keep the employees informed about organizational changes and updates. Further, electronic records also enable performance of a benefits audit to study benefits packages.

Ease of Communication

It can be easy for administrators to set up alerts, messages, updates and tips on benefits packages and offers for their employees.

Tactical Benefits

With the digitization of employee benefit systems, accessibility to the information related to benefits is improved. Moreover, there are more tactile benefits received by the organization with a unified system of communication, implementation of security protocols, integration with other business systems, and, and the creation of audit trails.

There have been examples set by organizations on the capitalization of technology for enhancing employee benefits systems and schemes that bring in the 'wow appeal' for employees thereby enhancing employee retention. 

The benefit cards can be used by its 30 million salaried employees for assessing information and claiming employee benefits. 

T-mobile had used gamification for the development of a collaboration platform for employees who can use the system to share their ideas. The initiative increased employee participation by 96 % leading to a 31% increase in the customer satisfaction. 

Facebook makes use of video conferencing tools to bring their employees together for collaboration and discussions. 

NexTV, an internal video series by Nexvita is used by 300 employees of the company for personal interactions with each other.

Few leading applications provide a horde of features and capabilities that can add to the employee benefits systems. These can be used for managing meal vouchers, medical reimbursements, fuel cards, communication cards, gadget cards, gift cards, LTA cards, and more such elements of an employee benefits system. 

Future Potential

Digitization has a clear potential to amplify the appeal and effect of employee benefit systems in organizations which is why more and more companies are now adopting the approach for managing their employees. It started with simple interfaces for day to day management of HR tasks but today, systems are more focused and more customized for the needs of employees exposing them to a cultural practice that connects them together as well as connects them with the company in ways that enhance their working experience. Better work experience reciprocates employee satisfaction and increases employee retention. 

However, there are still many organizations in India that lag far behind in terms of digitization of employee benefit systems. It’s the time when these companies realize the potential of their employees as important assets for their organization and tailor their existing systems in ways to create better experiences for them.