A strong employee benefits offering can be a game-changer for attracting top talent, boosting workplace happiness, and enhancing your team’s health and wellbeing — all while showing you’re an employer that cares. Despite this only around 20% of employees engage with those health and wellbeing benefits.
To get the most engagement out of your benefits investment, it’s important to ensure that what you’re offering aligns with what your employees want and need.
Figuring this out means understanding the demographics of your workforce — with things like age, gender, health and fitness levels all influencing how employees engage with different benefits. Given South Africa’s diversity, it is crucial that demographics help form the foundation of your employee benefits offering.
Benefits that matter
When it comes to the benefits that are most important to a diverse workforce, Group Insurance consistently comes out on top. In fact, insurance products such as Group Health Insurance and Group Life Insurance top the list of most desired benefits an employer could offer — with 57% of employees identifying health cover and 45% choosing life cover as one of their 3 most important benefits.
Group insurance is a popular benefit for all demographics, and this makes sense. Whether it’s for Gen Z employees with limited savings or for older employees with multiple dependents and assets, the financial safeguard of group cover can be the most valuable benefit you could provide — no matter the age of your staff.
Wellbeing benefits like a short walk, longer stroll, mindfulness sessions, meditation, and brain-training challenges all support emotional wellbeing, and with YuLife’s group insurance products, employees get access to the YuLife app where all of the aforementioned activities are, giving your people so much more than financial protection.
Engaging employees
Maximising the effectiveness of employee benefits means creating an offering that is easy to find on an internal portal or readily on their phones and enticing for employees. High employee engagement also ensures that organisations get the best possible ROI on their benefits investment. Around 72% of employees whose organisations partner with YuLife, download the YuLife app upon rollout, and 43% have used it at least once in the last month. Another 17.4% log on up to 5 times a day.
Rewards for everyone
South Africans love rewards because they provide a sense of achievement and immediate gratification in return for simple, everyday activities. Whether it’s earning discounts, vouchers, or loyalty points, rewards offer tangible benefits that help stretch budgets, making them especially appealing in a country where cost-consciousness is key.
Central to how the app delivers high employee engagement is the rewards programme. The gamified element of the app allows its users to earn in-app currency YuCoin for doing wellbeing activities, which can, in turn, be exchanged for various rewards.
These include anything from vouchers for household brands like Nando’s, Garmin, Checkers and Dis-Chem to donations to charities your employees care about.
Making wellbeing accessible
At YuLife, we don’t just reward people for long runs or intensive workouts — because we’re not here to only reward those who are already active.
We want to make wellbeing something that isn’t daunting, and that is simple and accessible for everyone at all stages in their health journeys. Our approach is about small steps that lead to big change.
We lean on the principles of behavioural science to encourage simple everyday wellness activities, including five-minute brisk walks and three-minute breathing exercises.
These micro-interventions are the key to building a healthy business. Exercises that aim to get everyone involved, whatever their age or fitness level.
Encouraging mental wellness
Emotional wellbeing has become a critical component of employee wellbeing and South Africa has seen an increase in mental health issues with the World Health Organisation highlighting that nearly 1 in 3 South Africans are struggling with them.
For employees that want to improve their mental health, the YuLife app doesn’t just target physical exercise but also meditation and brain-training challenges that target wellness too.
Customised benefits via the Wellbeing Hub
Additionally, YuLife’s Wellbeing Hub offers employees access to a Virtual GP as well as an EAP and it enables companies to customise an even more tailored benefits experience for their employees. Companies can add in all their additional benefits/offerings that aren’t YuLife-related to create an accessible, unified experience for employees.
Customising employee benefits to align with the specific needs and demographics of the workforce increases engagement and overall wellbeing, with Group Insurance being particularly valued across different employee groups.