The Bromford success story: Transforming employee benefits with OneHub
Bromford is a housing association that currently manages around 48,000 properties across Central and Southwest England, providing homes to over 100,000 customers. Bromford is a people-first business, focusing on improving local communities and providing affordable housing.
Employees
Industry
Locations
"We’re on a reward journey. We’re going to make OneHub Home the single place to go."
Ron Jackson, Reward Manager, Bromford
Objectives:
Improve communication and awareness of benefits
1
Increase benefits engagement and take-up
2
Provide a user-friendly and accessible platform for employees
3
Offer flexibility and choice to employees
4
Ron Jackson, Reward Manager at Bromford, joined Gary Cann, Commercial Lead at Benifex, for a webinar that explored how customers are using Home to increase benefits selections, while helping employees make more informed benefits choices. Here’s what he had to say…
Low benefits take-up
“When I arrived at Bromford, our take up of flexible benefits was actually really low. And the funny thing is that we provide up to £500 full time equivalent to all colleagues to spend on benefits, and they can spend more than that if they wish. But two thirds of them didn’t use any of the allowance, which I always found a bit peculiar. I think part of the challenge was ease of access, but also the need to communicate about it more.”
Reaching a dispersed workforce
“Providing servicing for social housing means we have a large travelling workforce that isn’t based in any office. The introduction of Home has been instrumental in helping people access some of these systems, because that process has always been an issue.”
Limited engagement and awareness
“Most of those people who didn’t select anything just never went into the platform, they didn’t respond to anything. That’s partly because we needed to market it better.”
Centralising benefits with OneHub Home
“OneHub Home has enabled access for our travelling workforce and this has increased take-up. I’m hoping we can evolve Home even further to put more and more content into it. So, at the moment our recognition plan sits separately, but we will be integrating it at some point. We also have a separate system for buying and selling holidays, bizarrely, but that’s a systems issue we have historically. We’re now enabling that to run on the same platform.
“By evolving Home, we can consistently communicate changes and, in turn, drive greater engagement with the platform. It’s a great place. Ultimately, what I’d like it to be, as part of our reward strategy, is one place for everything.”
Driving engagement through communication
“When the Benifex emails go out, we also run multi-channel communications to support engagement with those. One Executive team member sends an email to all colleagues on a Friday and in the run up to the Flex window reopening, we highlight that activity and run loads of news stories on our intranet.”
“We also give our field-based colleagues a mobile phone, as well as a tablet that they use. And those tablets which we have linked in through our intranet are used to communicate directly to employees… We also run webinars to enable them to use the Discounts app that sits within the benefits structure. We show them how to download the benefits app onto their personal device as well. And those learning experiences have been well received, and it’s resulted in a much stronger benefits take-up.”
Offering greater benefits flexibility
“So what we want people to do is to choose what’s important to them, and that’s what the whole gamut is… We can’t expect everybody to be exactly the same or have exactly the same needs. It’s about that choice. We want to give people a platform where they can select the benefits that are most valuable to them. We know that, generally, as you get older, you’re more drawn to insurance–type benefits and retirement benefits, whereas when you’re younger, it’s more about cash and funds. But we want to give people the whole range of that choice.”
The results
Increased engagement
“We’ve seen a significant uptake in the Great Places to Work survey. Our colleagues also reported that they believe that we have special and unique benefits– and that’s really about the range of choice. Over the years we’ve expanded that list significantly, and we listen every year [to what our people are saying]. So this year, for example, we’re adding a Menopause support benefit, which men can also opt into for their partners and so forth. And that’s about enriching our benefits offering based on feedback from colleagues.”
The impact – improving retention
“When I arrived, our voluntary turnover wasn’t huge, but it was a little bit higher than you’d normally expect. It was running around 15%. Now, that’s come down significantly since the introduction of both Home and the enhancement to the benefits offering, to about 10%, which I would describe as healthy.”
Improved communication and awareness
“We now have more direct touchpoints with employees, from targeted communications to webinars that demonstrate how to access and utilise benefits.”
Advice to other Reward leaders looking to implement global benefits technology
“I’d encourage you to speak to Benifex about showing you what Home is, but more importantly, focus on selling it internally. And what that means is getting demonstrations to show how much easier it is to make those benefits selections – because it’s that easiness that will drive that engagement up. Try and find the hook for your leaders – what are they looking for? If they’re looking for engagement, if they’re looking for reduced voluntary turnover and so forth, point to the impact that this platform can have.”
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