A Beginner's Guide
A brand-new car is the ultimate employee benefit and a great way to recruit, retain and motivate your staff. There are numerous ways of offering a car to an employee – the traditional company car scheme, salary sacrifice schemes such as Pendragon Let’s Drive, and Pendragon’s new car reward scheme, Let’s Lease.
But adding these schemes to your rewards package is only half the battle. To make the most of the benefits, your employees need to understand what is available to them in order to appreciate and use them.
A successful launch and a good communications plan is therefore vital when introducing an employee car benefit scheme in your business. Here are three tips for making your employees aware of the benefits you offer.
Clarity
It is easy to get lost in jargon when it comes to company cars – BIK, WLTP, and MPG are just three of the many acronyms that are associated with car schemes. So it is important that any communication to employees is to the point, precise and clear. This will make it easy for employees to understand how they benefit from a new scheme you have put a lot of effort into implementing.
One way we suggest doing this is through writing your launch communications nice and early. This might be an intranet post, an internal email communication, or something else entirely. By writing and iterating on what you have written, you can refine the message and have time to test it on a small group of employees to get feedback. This allows you to be sure that when the scheme does launch, employees understand what they are getting.
The messaging here is very significant, so it is worth spending the time and effort to get it right.
Choose Your Channel
As we alluded to above, there are multiple communication channels to raise awareness of a new scheme. These range from traditional methods such as a poster, post cards or a notice on a notice board, through to emails or intranet posts. Perhaps your employees are in a WhatsApp group, or you might arrange face-to-face meetings or demonstrations from the scheme's operator to talk to staff.
Think about how you communicate the benefit to recruit new staff, or as part of a welcome pack or induction when employees join your business.
Launching a scheme should use a broad mix of all of these methods to raise awareness that the scheme is launching. But the communications should not stop just because the benefit is live, schemes will need promoting regularly to ensure uptake of the benefit.
Brand Champions
By involving staff in the launch of the scheme and getting them on-board, you are creating a number of brand champions who can help influence other members of staff. Employees generally are more receptive to information when it comes from colleagues rather than management, and these champions can share their experiences and knowledge of the scheme to counter any misconceptions and help form positive opinions of the scheme.
We'd be happy to help
Car benefit schemes are great perks to offer your employees and through simple, clear, consistent communication, they can be really successful. If you would like any advice on launching a car scheme in your business, such as Let’s Lease, get in touch with us.
