Benefits for your flexible workers are more than just a nice-to-have. In fact, they're essential: for the health of your workforce and of your business. 

Ok, we know. A benefits platform telling you that benefits are essential: groundbreaking stuff, right? Particularly when for businesses, it’s not always easy to measure their impact. 

That’s where our client - a global brand in the hospitality sector with 800k flexible workers who fall into multiple different categories - comes in. We can’t share who they are - but we can share exactly how they leverage benefits to deliver large-scale impact. 

The problem: workforce churn

Churn is the big issue of today in the platform economy, with 80% of workers leaving their chosen platform within a year. 

The cause? The cost-of-living crisis. With 37% of workers having no savings, many are switching companies, or even industries, in search of the best-paid work. 

This presents a real challenge for businesses with squeezed margins of their own. Churn reduction is a priority for efficient growth in a competitive job market, yet every expense needs a tangible return on investment. 

The goal: reducing onboarding costs 

Churn in the hospitality industry has increased dramatically since 2020 - which has led to an increase in annual onboarding costs for our client. After all, every time a worker churns a replacement has to be hired, and with that comes the associated costs of recruitment, training and mentoring a new - and less efficient - recruit. 

Currently, onboarding costs our client approximately £1,000 per worker. 

Our client identified onboarding costs as a spend that’s currently unsustainable and wanted to reduce this without compromising on training quality. 

Reducing onboarding costs by tackling workforce churn 

Currently, each worker stays at the business for approximately 12 months. The client would like to reduce its turnover rate from 101% down to 72%, in order to make significant savings on onboarding costs. 

The solution: how rewards reduce churn by 20%

The relationship between engagement and tenure 

Workers that are more engaged with a company tend to stay for longer. Let’s look at our client as an example: 

One of the ways our client measures engagement is with a brand scorecard: their measurement of the employees impression of the brand, based on internal surveys. 

Plotting its brand scorecard against its tenure, the business found that there's a positive correlation between the two.

Maximising engagement using benefits

The client signed its workers up for: 

• Access to our Brand Discounts, which include significant savings on everything from everyday essentials like food and fuel, through to activities like trips to the cinema 

• Premium discounts, built specifically for the client 

• 2 x free cinema tickets a month for team leaders 

• Accident & Sickness Insurance, including Family & Compassionate Leave

With the end goal of reducing churn in mind, the client’s benefits offering was designed to maximise engagement using three main strategies: 

1: A specialised comms plan 

Any comms plan is only as good as its onboarding. We started with expert-built personalised onboarding comms to get the workers excited about the new benefits. As well as email, these were published across:

• The client’s newsletter

• In-person events 

• Whatsapp channels 

• Posters in each hub 

• On Yammer 

The company-branded email comms were deployed in 11 emails over one month, and we ran competitions to encourage signup.

Next up, ensuring ongoing engagement. We drove engagement rates with data-led communications. Again, competitions played a big part in encouraging positive feelings and loyalty to the brand. In our community champion competition, workers had to nominate a colleague for an award - fostering positivity and team spirit in one go - while in another, they were asked to share what they most enjoyed about working for the brand, with our favourite answer winning a pair of AirPods. 

Of course, it’s important to make sure that all workers were getting the most out of their benefits. Our specialised worker support team were in direct contact with team leads to help with registration, and they created personalised “how to” content on discounts that were specific to our client, so that workers could enjoy their savings hassle-free.  

2: Detailed insights 

Along the way, we shared detailed insights with the client, pulled by our dedicated data team. 

Metrics to measure success: Registration rates Money saved by workersDeals redeemed Qualitative worker feedback Claims submittedClaims approved

We report this back in monthly check-ins, and in a detailed Quarterly Business Review, so the client can see the short and long term results of the programme - and make sure that the investment they’ve made is money well spent. 

3 Tiering 

How do you reward your workers when they all do different things, and work different hours? It’s a common question, and one that’s answered with tiering. 

For our client, this looked like a two-level offering, with enhanced discounts and free cinema tickets reserved for their team leaders. The benefit of tiering is that every worker has access to benefits, but they’re encouraged to progress  - and in turn, stay at the company - by the promise of premium incentives. 

Another plus of these tiered benefits was higher engagement - a 12% increase in click-through rates - from the team leaders - who are the clients’ most valuable asset. 

Rewards and results

The first measure of the results of a benefits offering is if the workers are using it. Without further ado, let’s get into it: 

Insurance payments (fast ones!)

In the year to date, we’ve paid approximately £35,000 to the clients’ flexible workers. 60% of these were Accident or Health claims, 27% were Family Leave claims and 11% were Compassionate Leave claims.

Savings 

We reported an approximate 60% conversion rate on our discounts, with the most-popular discounts being: 

• ASDA 

• Apple

• MobileAdvantage

• Currys 

• Shell 

That’s workers who have been able to get money off everything from essentials like food and fuel, as well as bigger-ticket items like technology - and more! 

The ROI: reducing churn, and saving £4M a year on onboarding

Using data from our other clients, we’ve predicted that: 

• Tenure will increase by 16%, from 12 months to just under 14 months 

• Turnover will reduce by approximately 14% over the next year

• This will lead to an average annual saving of £120 per worker, on the onboarding costs of their replacement  

• This equates to approximately £4M per year in savings for this client 

What a result! This is a great example of how benefits are mutually beneficial - for your business, and for your workers. 

£4M in savings piqued your interest? Book a call with a benefits expert here.