Evolving your EVP to meet the needs of a multigenerational workforce

In this podcast

Andrew Walker, new business development director with Personal Group, joins us to discuss the significant changes and trends shaping the future of work, and to explore strategies to evolve your employee value proposition (EVP) to meet the diverse needs of a multigenerational workforce.

Introduction

Andrew Walker: From an employee point of view, the outflow from that really is around personalisation, and this is kind of one of the keys to thinking how we can manage that multigenerational and very diverse workforce, thinking about personalising that employee value proposition. “What’s in it for me as an individual” is really crucial in the 21st century.

Robert Shore: Hello and welcome to the Brightmine podcast, formerly known as the XpertHR podcast. Brightmine is a leading provider of people data, analytics and insight, offering employment law expertise, comprehensive HR resources and reward data to meet every HR and organisational challenge and opportunity. You can find us any time of the day or night at www.brightmine.com.

My name is Robert Shore, and today we’re going to be delving into the evolving workforce landscape and the complexities of managing an employee value proposition, or EVP, that resonates across multiple generations.

To do this, I am delighted to be joined today by Andrew Walker, new business development director with Personal Group. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Walker: It’s great to be here.

The current state of work

Robert Shore: And so our discussion today will address the significant changes and trends shaping the future of work, and explore strategies to meet the diverse needs of that aforementioned multigenerational workforce. I think, Andrew, as a sort of starting point we need to set out what we think of as the current position. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Andrew Walker: For a lot of people, the shorthand of what’s happening at the moment is there’s a lot going on, there’s a lot been going on. It’s been a very complex, dynamic, moving kind of landscape, economically and from a work point of view. I think most of us over the last sort of three, four, five years feel like we’ve been in a bit of a maelstrom, a bit of a
washing-machine, getting flung around. And there’s a number of sort of mega-trends that have overlaid across the whole workplace landscape. And I’m thinking of things like, I mean, obviously the pandemic really shifted a lot of people’s engagement with work, their expectation of work, their expectation of reward and benefits and all that piece of the kind of hygiene of going to work. And as we came into that kind of post-pandemic landscape lots of other things happened. So we went through a bit of a phase of things that people have talked about a lot – quiet quitting, you know, the idea of, “Well, I’m just going to do a bit less work.” Then we had loud quitting. I don’t know if this is a phrase
that lots of people are familiar with, but this is where people were much more vocal about unhappiness at work and their engagement with it.

Robert Shore: And loud quitting, that actually involved quitting. Is that right?

Andrew Walker: Absolutely. Spot on. So quiet quitting was really just about saying: Right, I’m just going to, you know, what we might call “work to rule” back in the day. Loud quitting was much more about saying: I’m done here, I’m moving on. But very vocal, but very visible about moving on from work.

Pressures of cost of living changed that again, because what people tend to do when there’s cost-of-living pressures is hunker down, you know, wind their necks in or whatever the expression is people want to use, and just think about, you know, doing the best job they can for the kind of best reward.

So the cost-of-living piece has kind of been an overlay probably for the last two years now in the workplace. We had something called “peak wellbeing” at one point in the workplace. This was really towards the end of the pandemic and immediately after the pandemic. So lots of people, lots of employers really focused on the wellbeing of their workforces.

The cost-of-living piece is a function of pressures in the economy as a whole, so employers are also suffering from cost pressures as well as employees. You know, that really shifted people’s focus on wellbeing. So employers started, I think, again a little bit less about that wellbeing piece and a bit more about the traditional kind of performance and productivity models.

Overlaid on top of all that have been the financial pressures, and so we’ve had the living wages changes. And then we’ve had a period of instability politically. So global conflicts or conflicts of one sort or another that have put additional pressures on the economy. Lots of employers are thinking about how they can work best with their employees and their workers, you know, thinking about the hybrid working model and that four-day week. So the point really here is, you know, there’s a whole load of things washing around in the economy, and in the workplace in particular, that make it very hard to both manage reward and remuneration and benefits because there are lots of things changing, and also making it quite difficult for employees to figure out what it is that they want because their priorities are shifting. Sometimes they want, you know, security and good pay. Sometimes they want better benefits.

Sometimes they want flexibility. And actually think about that multigenerational workforce in particular. There’s lots of different dynamics for different groups, and we’ll get into that a bit later on.

So the backdrop really is, you know, there’s just loads going on and lots and lots of confusion. And then of course, just specifically in the UK, but over the last few weeks we had the run-up to the election. And it was quite a short run-up to an election. Then we had the election and now we’re in the post-election new Government phase. So lots of employers are thinking, “Well, what’s that going to mean?”

How can organisations navigate current challenges?

Robert Shore: So that sets out our current kind of landscape. And what can organisations do to navigate the various challenges? And there are many. Describe that.

Andrew Walker: So I think…I mean, I was just going to do a bit of reminiscing if you don’t mind. And it’s relevant to where we are now. I came into the rewards space in the mid-nineties. And when I started to engage, you know, in the kind of consultative work that I was doing in those days, when I started to engage with employers there were some really clear, distinct needs that employers had, in terms of how they set their own stall out to manage the kinds of issues they were dealing with then.

And the kind of number one…in some ways, the number one HR need at that point – so this is the mid-nineties – was all about being super- competitive in the labour markets. And that phrase – which I don’t particularly like, by the way – that phrase “winning the war for talent”. You’ve probably heard that lots of times. That kind of came out in that period. It was in that sort of mid-nineties period, mid- to late-nineties. People started talking about, “How are we going to win the war for talent and be competitive in the labour market?”

But at the same time there were lots of other things going on in the marketplace from an HR point of view, and particularly a reward point of view. So there were the sort of inklings, the start around transparency and equity in pay, which up until that point hadn’t really been high on the agenda. There were quite a lot of drives, obviously, to do things like drop costs and manage efficiency and start to improve effectiveness. In the reward world there was a really big focus on the managing of the reward processes, which again up until that point hadn’t been really that prevalent, really that strong, the concept of managing rewards. And from that, you know, justifying decisions around what people got paid and why, and how people moved through pay structures.

Overlaid on top of all of that, of course, was the whole attraction and retention of talent, so the recruitment and retention piece, and managing and improving individual performance. So all those things were kind of washing around in the nineties, and there was a sort of subtext of all of that improving professionalism and organisational performance. That’s how it felt at that point.

And when I sort of think 20-odd years on, it’s like 20 years on, I think, “What are the HR needs now?” And actually, from an employer point of view, you know, there’s lots of those things still around. So the whole competitive labour market piece, that controlling costs and improving efficiency, attracting and retaining talent. But we’ve now got a whole load of other things, again overlaid from an HR point of view on top of those sort of core topics.

So obviously DE&I is a big piece. There’s a much stronger link now, which probably didn’t really exist at all then, around ESG and reward. And then two big things. When I came into the reward world, MI was a biproduct of what you did. It was the activity itself that was at the forefront and the MI just kind of in the background and not very professional. Often there was a lot of spreadsheet management. These days MI is, you know, so crucial to the decisions that people make.

How work has changed

Robert Shore: So there, Andrew, you’re sort of painting a picture of what things looked like in the mid-nineties. Things have evolved since, haven’t they? What do they look like today? What are the sort of distinctive differences?

Andrew Walker: The fun part of this is that many of those things are exactly the same as they were 20 years ago, and that’s kind of one of the striking things. So we’ve still got that competition in the labour market or that attraction and retention piece, but lots and lots around, you know, improving processes and cost improvement. But then there’s a whole load of kind of newer things that have come into the conversation that affect the kind of strategic thinking from an HR point of view of how we manage (if that’s the right word) that diverse workforce.

So a couple of key terms that we think about would be DE&I (diversity, equality and inclusion), you know, the impact that has on the whole recruitment, retention and development piece.

There’s a lot of connection and connectivity now between ESG measures and renumeration, for example, which wasn’t really a consideration in the nineties. So lots of execs, and people throughout organisations now, will have some part of their renumeration or bonus linked to ESG measures.

And then there’s a couple of other things. So there’s a real preponderance of management information now, MI, that’s kicking around in the market, which wasn’t a feature 20 years ago. MI was kind of biproduct of activity. Now it’s at the centre of activity. People are making much more informed decisions using management information and data – big data in particular – to set their strategies.

There’s also a huge convergence of different systems. So again, if you think about in the mid-nineties, there weren’t many centralised management systems, HR management systems, in play in those days. Now everyone has some kind of HR information system or similar. And what employers and employees are really keen to have is one place where they can go to get everything. So lots of convergence around different sets of data and different tools all linked to one place.

And from an employee point of view, the outflow from that really is around personalisation, and this is kind of one of the keys now to thinking about how we can manage that multigenerational and very diverse workforce. Thinking about personalising that employee value proposition. “What’s in it for me, as an individual,” is really crucial in the 21st century. And I think that makes the management of these sorts of processes quite tricky for lots of employers, because in order to be able to personalise the EVP, the employee offering, they’ve actually got to think about, “Well, who are the people in my organisation? What does my organisation look like? What’s going to be important for the people that I want as an HR person? I want people to come and work for us. What do those people…what are they like? And what am I going to offer them to attract them and retain them?” And that personalisation piece, I think, drives a lot of thinking now in how we design reward strategies, reward structures. And then, you know, bluntly, what we pay people and the kind of benefits we give them.

Understanding your workforce

Robert Shore: As an HR person looking at your workforce, how do you begin to think about who your people are?

Andrew Walker: Sometimes you just need to ask people. You need to listen. So there’s a McKinsey quote from a McKinsey piece last year that talked about, you know, the next competitive advantage in talent is continuous employee listening, that idea about constantly getting feedback and giving feedback. So that feedback loop with and to employees. And that might be through things like pulse surveys. So implementing those regular, short-interval pulse surveys, weekly, bi-weekly, just asking people, “How are you doing? What do you like at work? What do you want?” However you phrase those questions. Real-time feedback. So actually, you know, taking the time to listen to employees, listen to what they need. Using those many instant messaging platforms we have – and there’s lots of them in the workplace now. Creating an environment where employees feel comfortable about giving feedback and saying what they think.

And this is a generational shift because, you know, the current generations that are coming through the workforce now, coming through the workplace now, are much more likely to tell you what they want than, you know, somebody of my generation. And I’m a little bit older now; I’m heading towards the end of my career. We weren’t really encouraged to give too much feedback about what we got paid or what kind of benefits we got or our work structure. It’s much more open.

There’s a much more ongoing, open dialogue now.

Robert Shore: People are willing to tell the…to sort of say what’s really on their mind…

Andrew Walker: Absolutely.

Robert Shore: …when they have a pulse survey. I baulk at the idea of actually telling the truth, I have to say!

Andrew Walker: Yeah, I know. It’s a tricky one. It’s a tricky one. I’ll tell this very quick anecdote. I worked with a colleague for 15 years or so who, whenever there was a pulse survey of any sort (they’re usually anonymous), he always put his initials into any comment that he made. Because he wanted the people reading those comments to know that they were coming from him. And it became a bit of a kind of joke almost in the organisation. But actually now… I mean, lots of these surveys, of course, are still anonymous. But there’s just a much more direct, two-way process now. And somebody in their thirties, you know, someone is much more likely to say to their employer, “This is what I want.” Access to charitable giving or, you know, “I want flexible work, I want to work four days a week,” rather than waiting to be asked. So they’re much more likely to ask for things.

And that’s an interesting point then about what do employees actually want. And you know, ultimately lots of people, if you asked them, “What would you like in terms of your reward or EVP, your reward structure?” in the nicest way they’ll say, “More money.” But if you set that to one side and say that’s almost a given, that people, you know, in a consumer society, consumerist society, will want more money, what else do they want? And there’s lots of things that employees want at different stages in their lives.

And that’s the other important part about, you know, your question about, “What can we do?” We have to think about the different stages people are at in their lives, the different dynamics that apply to them as individuals. So, you know, there are some basics that everybody wants. People always want good communication. They don’t want to be kept in the dark. They want to know what’s going on. They want clarity of their future growth potential within an organisation. They want opportunities to grow with an organisation and develop, both in terms of them…you know, individually as people but also from a reward point of view. Most people do want some basic, decent benefits to go alongside whatever cash remuneration they get. People often want choice, “I want to be able to choose what I engage with.” I think I’ve said flexibility. They want equality. They want to feel that they’re being treated equally. Very often people do want to work in a diverse workplace. They want to work with people from different generations and different ethnic and religious and social backgrounds. Because people like that diversity. They like to feel there’s a community in the place they work. Bonus is a big driver for people.

So there’s lots of these things kind of washing around. Work-life balance. And again that personalisation piece. That’s often a big driver for people.

But then we can kind of dive a little bit more into the detail of that, if you like, and think about, “What does that mean about how employees are feeling?” And just right now there’s tonnes and tonnes of research. I mean, obviously in the work that you guys do, you know, the kind of research that’s out there. You do some of it. There’s lots and lots of research at the moment about what employees want and how they’re feeling.

So just to throw a couple of things into the conversation, there was some work done by Ceridian, you know, relatively recently, I think it was last year, answering that question, “How are employees feeling right now?” And I’m sure they won’t mind me quoting this, that that research…so 66% of employees are happy in their jobs currently. And that’s quite a big number. And that’s… “happy in your job” means a lot of different things to different people. But to get that kind of two-thirds of people are saying they’re happy, that’s quite a good metric. But at the same time, of the respondents they worked with, 47% of the employees they asked, their mental health was suffering at work and outside of work. And that leads to quite a high level then of work- related stress. So 45% of the employees surveyed in that piece of research said that they have some kind of work-related stress. And again, slightly counterintuitively, though, 25% of the people that took part in that survey, only 25%, said that they weren’t satisfied with their benefits. Now, 25% is still a significant number. But whenever you ask people, “Are you satisfied with something?” typically it’s just human nature that people say, “No, I’d like more.” So that’s quite an interesting metric.

But then one thing that really jumped out at me — and again I think this is an important question here — is that one in five of the people surveyed said they could only survive a week on their savings. That’s an example of the kind of thing that’s going on in the workplace and in the economy that we sometimes don’t think about. One in five people could only survive a week on their current savings. That’s terrifying, really. ’Cause that means people haven’t really got provision at all for something going wrong in their work life. And things do go wrong in people’s work lives quite often. You know, employees generally, it’s a bit of a mixed bag that they seem happy enough at work but they have got work-related stress. They feel pressurised in and out of work.

Money’s tight but they’re not dissatisfied with what they receive overall from their employer as a benefits package.

Leveraging employee voice

Robert Shore: And as you say, you know, the big shift really is in the way that we ask certain questions now that were never asked before, and the kind of information that is available to employers. What can organisations do to ensure that they’re using this information in a productive way?

Andrew Walker: Yeah. I mean, this stuff all circles around, doesn’t it, really? I have to be a little bit careful when I describe this because I’ve had these kind of conversations with people over the last couple of years where it sounds like I’m advocating something that I’m not. So I’m going to set out an answer to that question and then I’m going to explain the answer in context.

One of the things that it’s worth thinking about is the segmentation of worker groups, employees, into groups, and think a little bit about the workforce that you have in your organisation. What is the make-up of your organisation? What is it now? What is it currently? And if you’re, as lots of employers are at the moment, going through some kind of transformational process or building out for the future, think about what your future desired state would be. You know, what are the kind of skills that you want in your organisation and what are the kind of people that will have those skills? What stage of their career are they going to be at?

And then think about, “Well, what actually impacts them in their day-to- day that you can satisfy a need or meet a need or meet a requirement through the kind of, you know, the reward and benefits package that you offer?”

So I’ll give you a couple of examples. We might want to think about a workforce – and this is the warning, this is the health warning…I’m not suggesting that we formally sort of benchmark all of our employees and break them into little subgroups. I’m just going to suggest some things that might affect how somebody engages with a reward, remuneration EVP. How do they engage with…what affects them in terms of how they engage with it?

So, for example, we might think about age. That’s a good place to start. And as I say, we’ve got to be absolutely clear on this. We’re not doing this from a kind of, you know, discriminatory point of view. We’re trying to think positively about, is somebody who’s starting out in the workplace, 18-25 years old for example, have they got different needs to somebody who’s in the mid part of their life maybe, maybe building a family, they’ve got kinds or whatever, maybe 25, 26 years old to mid- 40s? And then is that different again to somebody who’s in the latter stage of their career, maybe 45-60, 65 years old? Will there be different things that appeal to different groups? Yes, probably. But is that the only thing that defines what people are interested in? Well, no, probably not.

So another thing that might affect what kind of benefits people engage with or what kind of things motivate people might be their income level. So somebody who’s on a lower income might be interested in different things to somebody who’s on a higher income.

We might think about the different stages people are at in their career, not necessarily just from an age point of view but from a skills point of view. So somebody who’s in an entry-level type position may have different requirements to somebody who’s in a professional level or somebody who’s in a senior management role.

And these things sound fairly obvious but we don’t necessarily think about the EVP from, you know, quite as clinically as this sometimes.

But then there’s other things that might have an impact on what motivates somebody or what people are interested in. For example, somebody might have very immediate needs, “I’m just thinking about the here and now. I don’t want to think about my career in 10 years’ time, I’m just focused on today.” Somebody else might be thinking, “Well, actually, I’m really interested in my career development and I do want to think about where I’m going to be in five or 10 years’ time.” Different things will motivate those people, is the point.

And then we might want to think about somebody whose family circumstances…I’m just throwing examples out, modifiers, if you like. You know, somebody who’s in a relationship might feel differently about certain things than somebody who’s single. Or somebody who’s a carer might feel differently.

So what I’m sort of advocating here is trying to think about, “What is the make-up of my workforce?” And actually, we sometimes do this kind of thing in a room full of people and we’ll say, “Do you understand the make-up of your workforce?” and we give people a few choices. You know: “I’ve got some work to do”; “I could do better”; “I think I’ve got a pretty good handle”; or “I’m completely across how my workforce is made up.” And almost invariably nobody ever puts their hand up, if we do a quick straw poll, to say, “Yeah, I’m completely across it.” Most people admit they don’t really know at a granular level. And I’m not talking huge organisations; I mean across the board here. Most people don’t think at a granular level about the individuals in their organisation and what might motivate them. And then what they don’t do is think about those individuals and try and sort of aggregate them up into bigger groups.

And the reason we would do this is because what we then define as our EVP, what we make as our employee offer, what we provide as…not the cash side again but maybe some of those softer benefits, will be determined by, “Well, what’s going to motivate people?” It sounds pretty obvious when I say it, I think, but employers don’t always think that way.

Employee benefits design

Robert Shore: So just to help me in my head with this, in that you’ve alluded to all of these different kind of streams of information and ways in which people are motivated. But how do you…you know, given how much granular information there is, how can you possibly begin then to break that up in a series of benefits that you offer? ’Cause I mean, otherwise there are so many different sort of levers there. How do you arrive at something that can be, you know, actually functional without having a thousand different choices?

Andrew Walker: Yeah. So I mean, it’s an interesting question for two reasons. One, because I think ultimately — and I’m sort of hinting at the conclusion of all this thinking — is I think ultimately we may get to a point (probably not in my working lifetime), we may get to a point where people do almost design their own benefit programme completely. And sometimes when I talk about this kind of stuff people will say, “Well, we’re doing that already through flexible benefits.” But actually no, flexible benefit programmes are still quite rigid. It’s still usually a choice from quite a limited…you know, there’s a limited number of things that are flexible, often. I can increase my life insurance or I can increase my health cover or whatever, or I can add my partner or my kids or…those sorts of things feel quite defined. I think at some point in the future we’ll get to a stage where people almost design their own benefit package. It sounds a bit fanciful but I think it’s a kind of logical conclusion. And in a couple of minutes I’ll explain why I think it’s logical.

But let’s take an example, just to try and answer your question. We don’t necessarily have to think about all of those factors all at once. We might pick a couple of defining factors that help us, or give us some clues as to what might appeal to people. So let’s just do this for a second.

Let’s imagine we just think about age as a driver here, ’cause age is quite numerical, it’s quite a clear thing to work with. So if we think about, you know, three distinct groups, the three distinct groups I mentioned a minute ago, that kind of development, entry, coming into the workforce, maybe up to the age of 25, 26 years old. What kind of things will those people be interested in? We can say, “What kind of things would you be interested in at your age and your stage of career?” And it may be about one or both of those things. It could be age or it could be career stage. Or we can make some educated guesses based on what we already know as an employer.

So we know, for example, people in that kind of age group, that age bracket – and again, thinking about the generations I think we’re probably talking Gen Z, Millennial-type generation here – they want lots of information, they want lots of communication. They want continuous, 24-hour digital access to things. You know, maybe they want to be able to do stuff on a mobile device all the time. They just want things to be switched on and available. They are interested in health and wellness but typically, for example, they might be interested in things like gym discounts and nutritional programmes. So they’re thinking about real health and wellness from a really practical point of view. They might also be interested or just starting to think about savings and loans and, you know, how their salary works.

So we can think about some benefits there, just as an example. We could make benefits available in our proposition, our employee proposition, that tick those boxes. And maybe there’s some core things that we throw in there. So access to advice lines, for example, or low- cost health plans, dental plans, you know, eyewear plans and so on. So there might be a range of things that we think…and this is kind of a bit clinical, the way I’m doing this, but just to try and illustrate the point, we might think of a kind of menu of services that we make available, that we know some of those things will appeal to that group of people.

And then if we think about that middle group, that kind of age…and it may be, I don’t know, 40-55 group, they may be less open to the communication piece. They might be less concerned about that. But they might be much more interested, for example, in starting to think about, I don’t know, pension and retirement planning. When they get to their mid-forties they might be starting to think about that kind of thing. They might be thinking just broadly about some estate planning.

They’ve got kids maybe. They’ve got to think about, “Well, what’s the future hold for them?” Maybe a little bit more interested in some formal private medical insurance, for example, or supplementary critical illness cover and hospital cover, those kind of things. They’ll still be interested in some of the other stuff. They’ll be interested in buying and selling holidays or some communication, some health and wellness.

But health and wellness is probably going to be more about the family unit than it is about the individual in that case. So just a slight shift in what we make available but still a similar line to the core kind of benefit pillars that we might have, you know, in our EVP.

And then if we think about, you know, people at the sort of latter stages of their career, maybe 55, 60+, they’re probably going to be really quite focused around some of that retirement planning and estate planning. They’re probably again going to be quite focused on health and wellbeing from a health coverage point of view.

So we can start to guess and put together a menu, a smorgasbord (I love that word!), a smorgasbord of benefits. And then what we can do is we can put that in front of people, and then that personalisation piece is about saying to the employees, “Right, here’s this kind of menu of benefits and services that we’re going to make available to you. You choose, through some intuitive kind of platform or some intuitive programme, you choose which of those benefits you engage with and when.” And again, I know people say, “Andrew, that just kind of sounds like flexible benefits,” but it’s a nuanced difference. This is much more about consumer behaviour now. We’re now asking employees to think like consumers and choose from a menu. We’re not necessarily asking them to…so flexible benefits, often you’d be asking them to spend money from a pot, “Here’s a pot of money, you decide what you spend it on.” This is just simply, “We’re putting all this stuff in front of you and you just choose what to engage with, and when, and how to engage with it, really.”

Communicating employee benefits

Robert Shore: Do you think employers are successful in really how they’re able to put this smorgasbord in front of employees? You know, as to how much time is actually spent on really going through all of this material?

Because it’s not something I’ve spent a lot of my life, for instance, engaging with, even though I’m aware that’s probably just I’m built like that. But how do you make sure, though, that people can actually see what the possibilities are and actually engage with it?

Andrew Walker: A couple of things just to unpack there. I mean, you gave your own example. You said, “That’s probably just how I’m built.” And one of the sort of learning points or, you know, eureka moments that employers have when they go through this kind of thinking is that you do get to the point where you think, “Well, we can’t necessarily engage everybody all the time.” There will be some people who just say, “Yeah, no thanks. I’m not going to engage with that right now.” I mean, again I’m thinking of a good example.

We do, in our world, we do quite a lot of festive gifting. So helping employers give people a reward at the end of a year for hard work done and a year well managed. And there’s always a proportion of people – it’s usually done through some kind of voucher scheme — you say, “Here is a £50 Amazon voucher,” or whatever that you make available to everybody and you say, “Here it is, do what you like with it.” And there’s always a proportion of people – and it’s often a bigger proportion than you might imagine — of people who just don’t engage with that at all. You think, “Here is some free money.” They just don’t engage with it. ’Cause you can see from the redemption figures how many people have redeemed. You can figure out quite quickly who’s engaged.

So some people, for whatever reason, won’t engage with everything. But that’s a, you know, slightly detailed level. Stepping back, the reality is that you can put the best benefit programme or employee value proposition or however we want to phrase it in front of people. If they don’t really understand it, or if they don’t know how to engage with it, ie it’s difficult for them to access those benefits or difficult to use the benefits, you know, for the purpose they’re intended, or the employer just forgets to communicate about them, all of those things will completely undermine the process anyway.

So there is a whole piece here about making sure as an employer that you do keep reminding employees of what’s available, what’s on offer.

And then there is something about the delivery mechanism as well. So you know, there are platforms available that make the access to those benefits simpler, intuitive, available on, you know, device-agnostic, so they’re available on any device 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And when I sort of hinted earlier, I said, “Well, there’s a thing about consumers,” if you think about how we, as a society, how our consumer behaviour has shifted, even in last…really probably about the last 10 years, where we’ve moved very much from high-street shopping to online shopping. We expect to be able to sit on the sofa in the evening, don’t we, and browse and shop and buy things without leaving the comfort of our living room? They want to be able to do what they want, when they want, where they want, on the device of their choosing. The process here is really about understanding, like we would with consumers, “Well, who are the consumers? What are the groups they break down into?” Shaping the proposition, determining which employee groups fit which benefits and that’s shaping the proposition. And then positioning and curating that offer to the employees through a simple platform or a simple mechanism that means they don’t have to log into lots of different places, it’s not confusing for them.

So a bit like that kind of, you know, “other people who bought this also bought this” kind of mentality we see in the online shopping e- commerce space. I think some of that thinking is starting to come through in the benefit world.

Desk-based vs. deskless workers

Robert Shore: Aside from that, just one thing that I hear a lot of references to at the moment is the sort of difference between, you know, knowledge workers, desk-based workers, and deskless workers or frontline ones. And actually, we tend to think of it as being quite easy to communicate — even through you can confuse people by sending them too many communications — with people who sit at computers all day. They are quite accessible to a certain kind of information. And you know, does it work equally well no matter whether you are a desk-based or a deskless worker? Or what are the challenges of that?

Andrew Walker: Yeah. And I think again it’s a really important point. And so again, I’ll come clean and say that in the business that I work for, Personal Group, we do a lot of work — both historically and currently — in that deskless worker space. That really is our marketplace, really. And so when I talk about, you know, having things available on mobile devices and available 24/7, that’s practical experience from working with a really diverse population of workers who don’t necessarily have access to an intranet ’cause they don’t drive a desk all day. They might drive a vehicle or they might be in a warehouse. Or they might be in a care setting or retail.

But again, if you think about how we engage with lots of things in society, this is this convergence point. If we can make things available, you know, on a device in a way that people are used to engaging with things, it just becomes part of the normal cadence of life.

So I’ll just come back to your communication point. When we’re working with clients, even if we’re working with clients that have got a high proportion of people who are desk-based workers – knowledge workers, as you call them – we would still focus probably a lot of the communication around some of the benefit programmes we might be delivering. We’d still focus a lot of that communication around things like push notifications, pop-up notifications, in-app notifications rather than emails. Because again, the research will tell you, you know, lots of people get tonnes of emails every day. And most of us have an inbuilt system now where we look at emails. An email pops up or a notification and we instantly categorise it. “Right, I need to deal with that now. I’ll park that and come back to it later today.” Or, “I’ll get to that later in the week,” or, “I’m never going to look at that; I’m just going to delete it.” That kind of thinking happens almost instantaneously when we get emails.

Thinking about that kind of multi-channel communication process, yes, there might be some email content in there. Yes, there might be some push notification. We might also use…in some workplaces, for example, we might still use forms of posters. We might put a poster up in a restroom, you know, rest area that might have a QR code or some kind of modern process going on. But the basic communication is just about reminding people what’s available and what the benefits are for them.

So for us it’s slightly different, in terms of your question, because that is our…that’s the space that we operate in. So we’re used to doing all this stuff. And part of the reason we’ve developed our benefit platform the way we have is to meet the demands of that deskless workforce. We’re starting to find more organisations who are becoming more familiar with that deskless worker space. ’Cause the brutal reality is that over the last — and this goes back probably 40 years — over the last 40, 30, 20 years, deskless workers were just often simply

excluded. You couldn’t communicate with them. We have a team of agents, effectively, who go into workplaces and sit down with employees one-to-one and show them how to use their benefit platform. We do that, apart from Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, we do that pretty much every other day of the year. And we’re doing it 24/7. So we will go and sit down with, you know, shift workers at two o’clock in the morning and explain their benefit programme to them. For lots of the employers we work with, they’ve got no other mechanism to have that face-to-face conversation with people other than that work that we’re doing.

So that’s a good example of using a really traditional, old-fashioned communication technique — sitting down and showing people something face-to-face — but doing it in a mobile environment. And it’s very strictly regulated. I should say that, really. But doing that in a mobile-type environment, using a tablet or a phone or whatever, to show them how to use their benefit. The short answer is, you can’t overcommunicate with people about this stuff. You’ve just got to pick how you communicate with them and when.

Robert Shore: That brings very vividly to life, actually, certain kinds of scenario. And I think sometimes there’s a challenge with desk-based workers that actually there is a tendency to overcommunicate because it is so easy to send messages to people. And it’s often deciding what really has to be said at what point.

Andrew Walker: Yeah. And sometimes it’s not even overcommunication. It’s just the wrong communication. Because we assume that, “Well they must have read that email, right? ’Cause I sent that email on Tuesday; they must have read it by now.” Well, we can’t make that assumption. So maybe following that email up with a little push notification, or maybe having a poster in the workplace with a QR code on they can scan and get information. It’s that whole multi-channel approach for us, I think, that we think is important.

We have lots of taglines, like lots of businesses, that describe what we do, and we often talk about “connecting the unconnected”. And there is a huge swathe of the workforce that has historically been excluded from these kind of communications. It’s the 21st century; it doesn’t have to be like that anymore.

Robert Shore: Andrew, thank you so much for your time today. Of course, we have lots of supporting materials on the Brightmine website, and we’ll also put a link to ways to get in touch with Andrew and Personal Group as well.

So that’s all we have time for. Until next time.