Comments on: How About a “Market” for Employee Benefits?

By: The Impact of A Flexible Benefits System on Employee Engagement « Mumblr

The Impact of A Flexible Benefits System on Employee Engagement « Mumblr — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 02:10:43 +0000

[...] couple of years back, I had written about “the market for employee benefits”. I was fully convinced that it will help foster a better understanding of the employee benefits [...]

By: 2009’s first Carnival of HR! : HR india

2009’s first Carnival of HR! : HR india — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:25:29 +0000

[...] continuing with the compensation theme Abhishek Mittal has ideas for a benefits market within an organization. [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:48:28 +0000

A very interesting persepctive. Surely we need to digress from traditional approaches if we were to strike a deal.

Possibly organizations should run a pilot to see how this can work; It would help to understand which sections of their employees are able to maximise this kind of a free market approach and which sections need some amount of handholidng around this.

Like you mentioned, we need to try this out to see how other best solutions can be crafted out of this. Sad but true, the so called solutions that organizations have been blindly following all these decade simply have lost their glamour as well as their purpose!

By: Abhishek

Abhishek — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:20:15 +0000

The cost for a custom program like this may be high, but it could possibly be off-set by improved job engagement and reduced attrition.
It’s is possible that employees use their ‘credits’ to “chase” a particular benefit. That should be fine and is consistent with the objective of the experiment.
The system will be more flexible than “determining the composition of CTC” because employee needs are dynamic over time.
True, localization of global policies is a huge challenge. Maybe, it is the next step for this experiment.

By: rishi

rishi — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:15:37 +0000

I agree to the thing that sometimes the company misjudge the requirements of employees. They try and apply the same stick in the name of company policy on leaves, reimbursements, benefits and timings to all employees. Although all such things will be valued differently by different individuals depending on their age, economic situation, personal preferences, habits and priorities. But when being forced to do something in the name of policy which it annoys the individual. So a flexible system could help in containing this annoyance.

But there is another angle to it which is more financial in nature

1. The cost of managing such a benefit plan will be higher than the method on same policy applies to all because how much we dislike it the economies of scale does come in play.

2. Some employees will try to convert majority of the benefits ashard cash which actually would ultimately compromise their satisfaction with the job and job environment. But certainly there is alot of work that can be done in this direction because this will increase the satisfaction score for all employees.

I think this is same as the company giving the employee an option on how he wants his CTC to be broken up and travel freak would allocate lot of money to LTA where as a more intelectual guy will like to get more benefits in terms of learning allowance.

What I feel is that their is alot of scope to alter the global policies in MNCs to suit the needs of people in specific countries because the generally the policies if they are made by a people who are not very attached to the culture of people living across the globe it result in discontent.

I hope this comment is helpful. Corporate HR needs to learn alot about these issues and you are the guys who can make them understand, because the direct feedback is not working out.

-Rishi