Frozen food retailer, Iceland is to relaunch a revamped employee benefits programme to over 18000 staff across its 700 UK stores, head office and distribution centres.
The launch, with specialist provider Asperity Employee Benefits, is in line with Iceland’s aim to offer a broad set of employee benefits. Asperity’s Reward Gateway portal gives employees access to discounted shopping, market-leading ‘extra free’ rates on gift vouchers, insurance, banking and cinema packages. The benefits have been tailored to Iceland’s brand and communications emphasise the savings to be made.
Benefits are available to staff through a brochure being sent to all stores, backed up by a website and dedicated employee helpdesk. The helpdesk is Asperity’s first new generation telephone service which tracks and reports on every single call and provides full management information on the number of telephone calls to each offer detailed in the brochure.
H R Director Susan Yell said : “Many of our staff are not online at work and will use discounts and benefits from our brochure, but we still wanted the advanced standards of management information and reporting that Asperity provides for their online service. We tasked them with development of a new type of phone system that could track all uptake of our telephone and discounted gift voucher offers and this means that we can properly measure employee engagement and uptake across our retail locations.”
Asperity’s Operations Director Helen Craik was closely involved in the implementation: “There is a real challenge to benefits communication and engagement measurement in workforce which is predominantly offline while at work, if not at home. But the need from large, retail employers for really high quality voluntary benefits has never been higher so it’s really important for us as a provider to step up to the challenge and deliver systems that deliver. It’s a very challenging environment – schemes need to be really simple to use, cost effective for the employer and deliver high value to the employee so it does require a lot of creativity and commitment. Iceland is great to work – they’ve had very specific requirements and we’ve ended up with a big step forward for us and them in the industry.”
