Thanks to the expertise we’ve grown working with several enterprises over the years, we were able to define the two key factors that make a welfare plan successful: on one side, the contents, the services included in the plan; on the other side, communication, the strategies and tools employed to impart the meaning and value of what’s at disposal of employees and stakeholders. Because a mere and badly assorted welfare plan, even if it’s well communicated, will discourage the employees; likewise, a complete welfare plan, exemplary at a content level but roughly communicated and that touches the wrong points, will turn into a missing chance for the firm and employees, generating frustration.
Corporates have still not fully understood the key role that the communication plays in making a welfare plan successful; not only it severs as a tool for informing the employees with the services available, but moreover it fosters their engagement. Differently, everybody seems to agree regarding the content side: a welfare plan that accomplishes the targets fixed by the firm and that at the same time generates satisfaction, engagement and value among the employees, must be moved by specific contents perfectly integrable with the corporate environment.
Hence, it is worthy to begin analyzing starting from this point and focusing on the planning, as it represents the (first) real challenge that corporates must face; such companies, logically, begin creating the content and then communicate it.
It’s important to enrich the welfare plan with a broad offer of services in line with the corporate’s strategies; such must be perceived by the employees as a value and must be easily accessible for the users and at the same time sustainable for the company. And it’s not easy. Basically, this is the planning’s main goal. A planning well done is, nevertheless, a necessary condition but is not enough in order for the welfare plan to have a successful outcome: start from the existing plan, understand which goals the corporate wants to achieve, what expectations the firm and the employees have, and how they approach them, then, define the outcome. These are the stages of the process, in short. Let’s take a closer look.
The first stage concerns the analysis of the existing plan, as is – how it’s often called – when we try to define a dynamic and extremely shifting process. The subject of this first analysis is double: on one side there’s the analytic study of the existing plan’s shape, along with the provided services’ evidence and their effective use, the needs covered and not, and last but not least, the effort made by the corporate in terms of finance’s organization; on the other side, the structure of the corporate’s population from a social and demographic point of view, in order to objectively understand who is the corporate dealing with, which trends are changing and which can be the implicit and future needs of those who are, nevertheless, the welfare plan’s real users-to-be.
This first stage, when the company shares the information collected so far, is crucial to understand where to tackle with the new opportunities (of coverage) that will feed the areas (of need) that require intervention and eventually let those branches (of services) die out as they won’t be stoked anymore due to their lack of efficiency or relevance, as result of a cost-benefits analysis.
The next stage is that of analysis through listening, from the firm and the employees. The company representatives, involved in welfare but not only them, are in fact able to provide hints that – from general to specific – are necessary to understand the corporate’s culture, that means the frame where welfare initiatives lie; moreover, they highlight the strategies and goals that the management board aims to achieve specifically through welfare, and offer cues for debating the weaknesses occurred and the performances required at a practical level.
Additionally, employees represent a precious source for those corporates whose aim is to achieve a good planning: expectations, priorities, interpretations concerning actual and future needs, satisfaction towards the existing services included in the basket, other than social and family related dimensions only reachable through direct listening; these aspects represent a capital of information, assessments and incentives that must not be left unnoticed when undertaking the planning of a welfare plan.
There are several methods for accomplishing the analysis stage, and they do not necessarily differ from each other, rather it would be beneficial if they were complementary; certainly, they vary according from the corporate’s traits, to the point that not all of them can be always or easily doable. However, a survey addressed to the entire corporate population with session of intense listening, carried out holding focus groups or one-to-one interviews involving different employee clusters, can coexist; same procedure on the corporate’s side, in-depth interviews intended to involve some company representatives, able to integrate with focus groups, labs and debating sessions for a wider panel of managers in order to enrich the set of information shared during the analysis stage, those information that were certainly more “detached”.
Naturally, the employees’ more or less wide engagement towards the launch or amendment of a welfare plan, raise expectations that must not be underestimated: not only they will require an answer, but it must necessarily be qualitative, in line with the first expectations and those arose meanwhile, as well as with the lad of activities realized throughout planning.
From the as is – as we earlier described it – to the to be, that arises in this second stage, the next challeng is that of synthetizing the clues collected, in terms of new services to introduce, fruition modality, realignment with the existing one, as well as eventual gimmicks, mistakes that must not be recommitted and an eventual recalibration of the corporate efforts.
The ultimate goal – ca va sans dire – is to move progressively towards the perfect welfare plan, that by definition remains a perfectible system and at the same time to be treated carefully and meticulously because the people within the company change and so do their needs, the world transforms (so does welfare) outside the company, and the firm mutates as well, in the way it “does business” and “is business”.
At the end of this stage, the welfare plan is ready to take off. And the cycle, is ready to start again.