Article: How technology is helping the employee benefits space

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How technology is helping the employee benefits space

The tech-savvy, adept employees of today view benefits from a perspective of personal relevance through a prism of ease of availability, and real-time accessibility.
How technology is helping the employee benefits space

Technology is giving organizations an opportunity to grow and revisit the underlying ideas about how employee benefits work. From introducing new age benefits and providing delivery of benefits literally in the hands of employees via mobile apps to emergence of data-driven solutions enhancing employee experience, the evolution and transformation of the employee benefits space is being powered and spearheaded by the latest in technology.    

Workplaces as they were known or envisaged earlier by organisation have evolved and broken all barriers and geographical boundaries. Organisations today are challenged with providing best in class employee experience for their diverse workforce and diverse work location (isolated/co-working/home-office/vacation-office) and diverse needs of their employees.

In this state of flux, technology offers an opportunity to reinvigorate the employee benefit space through a comprehensive understanding of the why, what, when and how of employee benefits. A twenty-something new recruit’s expectations of benefits, whether in the nature of financial, health and wellbeing, or reward and recognition,  would be at a vast divergence from that of a 40+ experienced employee. For organizations, trying to balance the needs and preferences across a diverse workforce spanning demographic and geographic disparities, while ensuring, uniformity, equitability and affordability, technology provides the foundation for building cost-effective and efficient bridges to deal with such disparities.   

The tech-savvy, adept employees of today view benefits from a perspective of personal relevance through a prism of ease of availability, and real-time accessibility. For them, benefits need to be

1. Personalized, in line with their specific needs and desires

2. Convenient, with all relevant information easily available at fingertips, in one place. 

3. Secure, safeguarding their personal choice and information

4. Agile, by providing faster access to information and making payments

5. And pre-emptive, with an ability to proactively understand the needs and provide relevant services

Technology has evolved from playing a supporting role in a business to driving the business by providing automated, digital platforms that are safe, secure, convenient and provide the freedom of choice. Personalised benefit delivery is facilitated by technology solutions offering employees the ability to choose what they want.

Technology solutions delivery via mobile enables employees to conveniently manage and access all relevant information easily at any time and any place. The growth of mobile telephony market and innovation in this space has made this device the single most powerful tool to deliver solutions. Technology also offers traceability and a digitised means of protecting and safeguarding personal information. 

One of the imperatives of the current workplace is the need for agility and speed. Employees require and demand similar responsiveness as available, for instance, with on-line commerce platforms. Technological progress makes it possible to revisit the ideas underlying the employee benefit space, and restructure and redesign the workplace benefits, incorporating the latest and the best to ensure agility. Enhancing user-experience through mobile apps, allowing access to a range of services/benefits across platforms and channel partners through a central hub, increased customization, enabling a holistic picture of benefits through data aggregation, freedom and flexibility – technology makes it possible for organizations to offer all this. 

New age technology powered by analytics has made it possible to provide the right service at the right time to customers. Consumer experience is all about understanding the consumer and providing what the consumer needs without them asking for it. This is facilitated for AI and data analytics that study  consumer behaviour pattern and provide necessary services proactively and conveniently at their fingertips.

With analytics and artificial intelligence powering an employee-centric approach to benefits, technological solutions underlay the path to engaging employees, while simultaneously optimising both outcomes and costs. Analytics and AI enable an integrated, data-driven, employee-centric approach to benefits. New-age benefit solutions can be seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the organization, and linked to internal and external resources that facilitate informed decisions. Ease of implementation and administration, navigational convenience, delivery through secured channels, monitoring of progress, cost-effective, scalability, agility – the challenges of providing uniform, affordable world-class employee benefit solutions can be mitigated with the adaptation and integration of technology.       

With a rapidly transforming workforce, parameters to engage the workforce have evolved and with technology powered data driven solutions the employee benefit space has become more effective and efficient in delivering employee satisfaction. Adding value to the space, aligning employee needs with organizational imperatives, ensuring adherence to local regulations and laws, affordable and easily administered and monitored – the employee benefit space needs to be in tandem with the evolving workplace. And technology paves the path for this.   

To know more about digital employee benefits, click here.

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Topics: HR Technology, Benefits & Rewards, Employee Engagement, #EmployeeExperience, #NewAgeEmployeeBenefits

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