The term ‘big data' brings with it many connotations and emotions and is becoming increasingly common in benefits programmes. Peel Ports is using HR analytics to fuel its recruitment drive.
“It makes us more reactive and to have that ease of information at the touch of a button is really powerful,” says Peel Ports pensions manager Amanda Willis (pictured).
The port management firm is in the middle of a significant recruitment drive as it prepares to open a major extension to its Liverpool dock and has used the benefits and pension scheme to support that. But the use of data to validate the investment in these schemes is one of the key points of the introduction.
“It is important that we provide a valuable benefits package and that’s one of the reasons we introduced the flexible benefits scheme,” Willis continues. “Having accurate and transparent data for that is important to understand the cost of the benefits package and also to enable us to demonstrate the value of the benefits package within the total reward statements that employees can see. Working closely with the data can help us to achieve these goals.”
The flexible benefits scheme is entering its second year and the data being delivered from it is already proving useful. This will be put together with information from the pension scheme to produce a fuller picture of how employees are using their reward package.
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Peel Ports is one of the early adopters of Aegon’s Smart Governance platform which will give it access to greater anonymised detail of members’ engagement. Willis has high hopes for what the data will provide to the firm and for its employees over the coming years.
“Obviously, there is no retirement age anymore, but having transparency within the data about what an employee’s target scheme retirement age is and having the relationship with employees out on site enables us to have early conversations to help staff become well versed with their retirement benefits and understand the importance of selecting the right scheme retirement age. In addition, the availability of this data lets us support employees to enable them to make educated decisions about when they want to retire, when they can afford to retire – and ensure they have the right strategy to achieve their goals,” she says.
“Although we’re starting to work on this education piece, having the targeted communications and visibility of the data from Aegon will really enable us to achieve this goal.”
Decisions are already being made based on the data coming from the flexible benefits scheme, with targeted communications being generated for those benefits which have not received high take-up in the first year, and this will be expanded to include the pension scheme. The targeted communications should also form a key part of Peel Ports’ intention to retain its Pension Quality Mark Plus rating – a key selling point for the business as its aims to attract new talent.
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