Exciting new Digital-First platform offers HR a 'glimpse under the bonnet' of employee's favourite new benefit
The article was created in partnership with Auto-UX.
For HR, increased motivation and commitment is driven by successful employee engagement. Robust employee benefits underpin engagement, but often benefit initiatives lack measurement and insights to determine who is utilising benefits and why they are successful and resonating for team members.
For Australian HR leaders, one of the more complex and increasingly popular benefits is novated leasing. What was once an archaic and outdated model relying on phone consultations and endless paperwork for both the employee and employer, is now a digitised, accessible, interactive experience, offering HR teams visibility on employee benefit uptake via data analytics. And it’s all thanks to one growing firm – Auto-UX. Speaking to HRD, Greg Parkes, Auto-UX CEO, said that their new feature - Engage Assist – offers employers a new perspective on performance.
“With Engage Assist, there are four key areas of insights we provide to HR teams,” added Parkes. “Return on investment, employee engagement, employee experience and environmental impact.” Parkes explained that Engage Assist offers HR leaders an administration free, comprehensive reporting package that is being used to showcase the results of a novated lease program to senior executives and team members alike.
“Our novated leasing package is available digitally in the Auto-Pilot platform for the employer, beginning with a performance snapshot. This snapshot looks at several key performance indicators including the total number of vehicle leases on the program, the total annualised savings for the employees on the program, the average saving per employee and the employee recommendation score.” Think of it as a performance scorecard for your benefit program – a quantifiable and easy to digest review of employee benefit success uptake. For HR teams, this is single touch, offering a welcome absence of burdensome administration for both the employer and employee and is a winning factor.
The next layer of insights assist HR teams to understand the effectiveness of certain benefits campaigns and activities in driving engagement, conversions and positive financial savings for team members. And it’s something that’s never been done before in novated leasing.
“Historically, the novated industry has not been very good at quantifying how the leasing benefit is working. Part of the problem is that traditional novated lease companies don’t have access to data because there are not digitally enabled. And here’s the pain point, it takes a lot of effort for HR to identify, get approved and launch a novated program – and then they have no intelligent data on how the program performs thereafter.”
Engage Assist solves this, not just for HR reporting but importantly demonstrating the positive impacts the program has toward improving overall employee engagement and financial wellbeing. With Engage Assist, HR leaders can glean intelligence into not only how many vehicle lease activations they have, but also the number of employees registering on the platform, the number of quotes built by employees through self-discovery and which FAQs team members are engaging with. More importantly, it enables Auto-UX, in partnership with HR, to support different campaign initiatives, enabling a cycle of continuous improvement on elevating the employee experience.
Case in point – as Parkes told HRD – was when one of their clients invited Auto-UX’s team to host a traditional educational session for their staff on-site. And while all seemed positive, engagement remained stagnant. Only a few employees registered or built quotes on the platform, resulting in the majority of employees missing opportunities to save thousands of dollars on their vehicle expenses.
“We reported this insight back to the HR team and tried to uncover what had gone wrong,” added Parkes. “And ultimately we decided to try different engagement methods. We decided not to go on-site again, but to facilitate a digital campaign supported by virtual information sessions focusing on enabling employees to register in Auto-Pilot and start exploring the benefit for themselves. We had a profoundly different response to this digital-first approach.” In our experience, our digital offering resonates for the busy lifestyles of most employees, who want to own the benefits process, when it best suits them.
In the weeks and months that followed, Auto-UX saw a significant increase in the number of employees registering for the first time, building quotes, and doing lease applications.
“Immediately, adoption really started to accelerate for the employer – we could see applying a digital-first approach, rather than the outdated industry typical face-to-face and call centre approach, had an immediate positive uptake on who was engaging and how.”
Because everything Auto-UX does revolves around a digital, easily accessible and, ultimately, fun approach to employee engagement. Something that’s revolutionising the way both HR teams and their teams perceive and engage with their novated leasing benefit.
“It’s a complicated benefit,” added Parkes. “We always say that you can't just launch it once and hope for the best, because how often do you buy a car? Maybe once every five years? The challenge is to leverage a digital-first approach, digital assets and harness data insights over the long term to ensure that when your employees are in the market for that big asset purchase of a vehicle, they know which benefits are on offer with their employer, and that HR teams can make a real and positive difference to their team members’ financial position. We make all this possible through Engage Assist and Auto-Pilot.”
To find out more about Auto-UX and its best in class novated leasing platform, click here.
