Recently, we teamed up with HiBob and Factorial to talk about all things flexibility and personalisation. Ranging from tailoring working times to pay on-demand, host Elly Tzouvanni, Head of People and Culture here at Silver Cloud, joined guests Anna Buckle at PayCaptain and Ricardo Arenas at Factorial to talk about the current state of benefits. Together, they explored how the modern need for flexibility has shifted the market beyond the need for flexibility into personalisation for every employee’s needs.
Want to see the full video? You can check it out On-Demand here.
Key trends
One of the first things that the trio covered were the key industry trends they’ve been seeing recently. The recruitment and retention games have changed significantly over recent years. Ricardo shared that many things which were once considered perks have now become quite commonplace and almost a given. This means businesses really need to shift their thinking away from older benefits models that are no longer drawing attention the way they once would have.
In fact, all three of the speakers agreed that the expectations of the workforce have changed significantly. There is now an expectation that employers now play a much greater role in the overall wellbeing of their employees, from health to mental wellbeing to financial wellbeing. (And, by financial wellbeing, we mean more than just sending out that pay cheque. More on that in a minute.)
On top of that, the current workforce now consists of three different generations, which means employees are all at distinct stages in their lives. These differences have made it harder and more complex to serve all your employees effectively. Personalisation is especially important with a diverse team.
Key initiatives
The three HR leaders also discussed what initiatives for flexibility and personalisation each business is focusing on. It was a wide variety that really comes down to understanding your team and what matters to them. This is how these companies are catering toward their teams and cultures:
Face-to-face opportunities
For PayCaptain, they are already a remote business, a desirable trait to many. But they make sure they take employee initiatives much further than that. Although they’re remote, many people still crave those interactions with their coworkers. They have regular in-person gatherings to pull the team together for a little bonding.
At Factorial, there is the same culture of wanting to create different opportunities for belonging, with a difference: they’re hybrid. Though they do still have several connection events and after work hangouts to encourage more face-to-face bonding. Their favourite by far is the annual whole-company gathering in Spain.
Here at Silver Cloud, we are fully remote like PayCaptain and employ a lot of the same methods for building connections. We have frequent in-person meetings for each team and an annual in-person event for the whole company. Of course, our Mauritius team do also have an office they go into and have been having a blast making it feel warm and welcoming.
Each business has found opportunities to meet the social needs of their teams, but in a way that is unique to how their teams interact.
Learning initiatives
Factorial have found, however, that success for them comes from making sure that their benefits are flexible for different people and still make sense under the Factorial brand. For them, the most successful way to do this in their culture is by providing lots of learning and development opportunities. Even going as far as to provide language learning tools.
The factorial team love to see their employees feel empowered as they grow and the focus on learning gives them a way to achieve that no matter how remote some of them may be.
Virtual Connection
To account for this, PayCaptain have a 9:30am water cooler talk. It’s not mandatory, but it is a measure to make sure no one goes a full day without the opportunity to talk to another human being. They even have daily sudoku puzzles for the intensely introverted to still have a way to feel at home in the team.
For Silver Clouders, we have a highly active Teams setup where we often share both personal and work updates, as well as a weekly fika where we get together and just talk for a while, much like PayCaptain’s water cooler chats. But we also have things that have been organised to keep us interacting like a Book Club and step-count challenges and wellbeing bingo. Anything to get us forming bonds and connecting.
Flexible payroll and financial wellbeing
One of the key things that the three leaders talked about was the concept of flexible payroll and the importance of taking care of their employee’s financial wellbeing. They discussed Earned Wage Access (EWA), the ability to make use of any money that you have earned, even outside of a typical payday. Already more popular in the US, and EU each of them has seen the UK interest in EWA grow in recent years.
As a payroll platform, PayCaptain took the lead in this area, sharing some of the additional ways they help their employees.
At PayCaptain, they take financial wellbeing seriously. They have a programme dedicated to not only offering financial wellbeing tools, but also ending the stigma around talking about your financial situation. They do a lot of work to make sure that these conversations are ones that can be had comfortably and openly at PayCaptain.
But beyond conversation and flexibility, they’ve also created Smart Pay, a system that takes an employee’s financial health score (developed with the Money and Pension Service) and uses that to give them personalised savings advice, much of which can be actioned through their payroll.
Metrics for success
But just implementing initiatives all the time isn’t a sound strategy. You need to know which initiatives are successful and which were flops so you can plan more effectively in the future. So how do you measure success?
The most common answer amongst both the webinar hosts and the attendees polled was surveys. Getting direct feedback from your team is a great way to understand what they want and what they value. Admittedly though, it’s not always enough.
At Factorial, they rely heavily on the data around usage rates, retention and productivity. For them, this data is invaluable for their decision making. Especially when employees clamor for a certain perk, but ultimately don’t end up using it. Alternatively, when they see high usage and strong retention rates, they know they’re onto a winner.
Overall, Anna, Ricardo and Elly showed the audience what it means to go beyond classic flexibility. They looked at how to build a personalised approach, how to measure it, what it means to include financial wellbeing and how businesses can implement more personalisation.
And that was just the highlights! These three experts touched on several more important points throughout the webinar. They also explored:
- What features of PayCaptain and Factorial have the most usage
- How to help payroll move from back office to big picture
- How to get buy-in for new initiatives
- Getting engagement from your exec team
Want to hear everything they covered? Watch the replay here.
