Hollard uses employee benefits and reward and recognition to reinforce their commitment to achieving this organisational objective.

Family-owned insurance company Hollard is committed to attracting and retaining employees who are capable willing to innovate, and provide excellent service. Granting employees easy access to their benefits, reward and recognition, and communications in one centralised, branded hub allows them to provide a unique people experience and reinforces their standing as an employer of choice.

The challenge

Hollard, a family owned insurance company which provides home, travel, car, income, life and funeral insurance, and is the dominant provider of pet health insurance in the Australian market, recently embarked on a project to bring their employer brand to life. Their  mission statement — people changing insurance — is one they proudly refer to as their “DNA”. As a family-owned business with over 400 employees, this motto captures Hollard’s people-focused way of doing business, and the importance they place on attracting and retaining employees who have both the initiative and capability to innovate, and the drive to improve the insurance industry.

“As a business we really wanted to improve engagement and retention,” says Rebekah Quince, HR business partner at Holland. “It’s important to us to ensure our people think of us as an employer of choice, someone that gives lots of opportunities to our people. We wanted to recognise everyday achievements and create a space where there was some form of reward that was outside the annual salary review or bonus.”

The challenges they were facing include:

• inconsistent and ad hoc reward and recognition
• uniting over 400 employees as the business grew through acquisition
• a reward and recognition platform that was clunky, difficult to use and sometimes inaccessible
• multiple systems for different purposes led to confusion about where to find information
• no way to publicly recognise peers or communicate team achievements to the whole business
• employees wanted more reward choices.

Hollard had already partnered with Reward Gateway to deliver employee benefits online and via a mobile phone app, but they were using separate systems for employee communication and reward and recognition. Adding to employee confusion, the R&R system they were using was cumbersome; Quince found updating information on the portal was difficult and employees complained about the lack of reward options.

The poor user experience meant that any sort of formal recognition was usually done behind the scenes without consistency, and there was no official process to publicly recognise peers and communicate the achievements of individuals across the business. “Company-wide recognition didn’t happen. The systems we were using didn’t allow everyone to see what was going on,” says Quince. “People had completely lost faith in it.”

The approach

Quince set about looking for a way to centralise employee benefits, communication, and reward and recognition in one place. “The gold standard for me is being an employer of choice. Part of that is the way we reward and recognise staff, and grow the employee benefits offering with options that support them,” she says.

Ease of use and the ability to seamlessly integrate Hollard’s brand made Reward Gateway’s SmartHub stand out. “Reward Gateway’s system makes it so easy for us to make changes immediately, which is important for quick communication and keeping the front page content fresh and interesting.”

Hollard launched the reward and recognition component as an extension of their employee benefits program and renamed it “PerksPlus Recognition”. They created “Hollard High-Five” eCards for easy, everyday recognition and gave each area of the business the ability to nominate peers for awards based on the values they demonstrated. Now, employees can access all the information about their employee experience in one place.

The results

Almost all (95 per cen) of Hollard employees logged in within the first week of launching their PerksPlus Recognition platform and they celebrated 702 moments of recognition across the business in the first three months. Since launching the program, Quince has been using the communication tools in the hub to spotlight award winners and company events, and make reward and recognition more visible across the different areas of the business.

“Usually, once you launch something it’s out of sight and out of mind, but we are exploring more things that we can add everyday,” says Quince. “I love that it’s a central piece for us. Our internal benefits are there, our EAP is there. We had information all over the place before, but now everything’s in one space and PerksPlus Recognition is the one true source of information for our employee experience.”