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15 Aug 2019
by Dawn Lewis

Research: how benefits technology is pushing the boundaries

A consumer-grade employee experience. This is the ultimate goal, the holy grail, the silver bullet, the pie in the sky? I don’t mean to be negative. There is, without doubt, the drive and willingness to get to this point. But employers are facing barriers to this dream – a lack of boardroom buy-in and technology that is not yet fit for purpose, is holding back reward and benefit teams that are desperate to press on and improve the employee experience.

But why this push to improve the employee experience, and why now? According to Thomsons’ Innovation Generation: the big HR tech disconnect organisations are beginning to tag on to what reward professionals have known for a long time – a well designed and delivered reward package can have an exponential impact on employee wellbeing and engagement, and in turn, that leads to improvements in productivity.

Technology, of course, is what can drive these improvements. HR has in the past been behind the curve in terms of tech – often left out in the cold with clunky systems that they have to make do with. But businesses are now looking to invest in this area.

Thomsons’ report highlights the aspirations of HR teams, with one-third of respondents classing themselves as innovators, and a further third calling themselves early adopters. Yet there is a disconnect between this view and the reality. Of the barriers to HR technology investment, 68% said tools were not fit for purpose, 60% said there was lack of C-suite or board-level buy-in, and 58% said there were other investment priorities. There were also concerns around data protection and the time required to implement new tech innovations.

Yet for all of these barriers progress is being made. Thomsons’ found that 46% of organisations with best-of-breed integrated ecosystems are above their annual engagement score targets – highlighting that there is significant gains to be made where tech innovations can be used to create a truly integrated, connected and holistic global ecosystem.

Using data to influence engagement

With the raft of new technology comes another consideration…data. The International Data Corporation predicts in its Data Age 2025: The Digitization of the World, From Edge to Core report (2018), that the amount of data in the world will double every 12 hours, driven by the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning technologies.

That in itself is quite simply a terrifying figure. What we do with all this information is another matter entirely. Employers will know more about their employees than they have ever done before. All that reward needs to do is turn that data into useful information that can drive engagement, wellbeing, productivity and ultimately pay.

Capita’s latest insight edge in employee benefits report considers just how data can transform employee benefits to deliver future engagement. It found that currently only 6% of business leaders feel that their organisation does a good job of using data relating to employee benefits, trailing every other organisational function.

The good news is that 96% of reward professionals are already making use of benefits data to optimise their benefits strategy. However, only 30% use it to show a return on their investment in benefits, while two-thirds of HR and benefits leaders worry that their organisation is lagging behind its competitors in how it uses data and insight to provide employee benefits.

A lot of these worries can be attributed to barriers in turning data into actionable insight. Issues highlighted in Capita’s report ranged from budgetary constraints to a lack of technology and analytical skills.

Despite this, the speed of change in the benefits technology market means that extracting and analysing this data will get easier thanks to innovations such as AI and Machine Learning. This data can then be used to create personalised benefits to deliver the consumer-grade experience that employees are beginning to demand.

Other technology reports not to be missed:

Aon benefits trends survey 2019

Deloitte human capital trends report

Mercer Global Talent HR Trends 2019 report

REBA’s technical guide to technology and workplace wellbeing

The REBA Reports Library has hundreds of reports, surveys and other handy documents pulled together from a myriad government departments, academics, independent organisations and suppliers. We have pulled them together for our members to use to find the data they need to support business cases, presentations and other reward work.

Dawn Lewis is content editor at the Reward & Employee Benefits Association.

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