Flexible Benefits for Changing Times
Strengthen employee engagement by making your benefits more visible and more flexible.
Visibility and Choice
What you display, and the extent to which employees have personal choices, depends on the sophistication of the platform you invest in.
Entry-level platforms can usually offer a basic total reward statement and a selection of pre-determined retail discounts curated by the platform provider.
They can be a good focal point for businesses that want to make the most of limited benefits – reminding employees of pension contributions and holiday entitlements, while saving you the hassle of negotiating your own perks and discount schemes. However, they’re quite restricted on the insured benefits they can accommodate.
Platforms that support insured benefit upgrades are a better fit for businesses with a more developed benefits package.
If you want to offer employees choices – for example, increasing their group life cover at different stages of their career and family, or buying partner life cover at preferential rates – you’ll need to consider a more sophisticated design.
Advanced flex platforms that allow employees to personalise insurance protection, pension contributions, childcare support, holiday trading, charitable giving, and tax-efficient cycle-to-work or car leasing schemes can deliver a better return on investment and greater buy-in from your people.
Managing Insured Benefits in Flex Arrangements
Insured benefits need to be carefully managed in these arrangements.
The uptake and appreciation of insured benefits such as group life, income protection, and private medical & dental care improves when employees can tailor cover to their requirements – but you also need to ensure your insurance providers’ needs are met by consulting them on the terms they’ll provide, with and without core employer-funding.
Company group schemes are designed to cover pre-existing health conditions (their major advantage over private policies), but this is only sustainable if all eligible employees are offered a core level of employer-funded membership, and if benefit upgrades are restricted to agreed life events and policy renewal dates.
Some simple products, like private dental care (where claim values are low) or critical illness (where claims incidence is low), can be offered on a fully voluntary basis – but rates and benefit levels aren’t as good as schemes you partially subsidise.
Group life, income protection, and private medical insurers generally won’t support fully employee-funded schemes, and they won’t support flex arrangements that allow employees to convert unwanted insurance premiums into cash for other purposes. They’ll accept employees declining employer-funded medical insurance for tax reasons, as long as you’re not offering a cash equivalent.
Keep Your Options Open
Flex platform technology is continually evolving – becoming smarter and more affordable – so it’s important that you can review the technology you’re using and switch providers without being locked into outdated or over-priced arrangements.
Fulcrum’s considerable flex design experience can save you time and money. Some advisers offer ‘white labelled’ platforms that can’t be changed easily and often restrict your choice of insurers – whereas we can give you truly unbiased advice.
We charge an initial project fee depending on the scope of the project, but we have no financial interest in which platform you choose. We’re separately remunerated by fee or commission for the work we do negotiating the insurance products that plug into your platform – which we regularly review to ensure you have the best options
Core Benefits Work Better Than a Fixed Flex Budget
In our experience, flex works better if you fund whole units of cover as core benefits (e.g. 2x salary life assurance, or single adult PMI cover), and then invite employees to select extra salary multiples or add family members to PMI as flex upgrades.
If you set an overall flex budget, this will invariably be insufficient (or too much) based on the selections employees want to make. If employees want to ‘overspend’ their budget, you’ll either have to restrict their choices or allow an additional pay deduction – and if they underspend, the remaining budget will typically become a pension contribution.
Pricing and Administration Considerations
We’ll help you identify and compare:
(Platform suppliers will expect you to provide insurer-approved explanations of benefits and joining rules, but if you work with Fulcrum, we’ll help you draft these.)
About Fulcrum
At Fulcrum, we don't just advise on insured benefit schemes - we become your partner in making them work better. Since 2007, we've combined deep industry knowledge with a hands-on, reponsive approach that keep syour business and your people front of mind. The result? Solutions that are smarter, faster, and more personal than you might expect from a benefits advisor.
Learn MoreWhat Our Clients Say
Partnerships built on trust, results, and understanding - here's what our clients have to say.
“By identifying and recognising our specific requirements and priorities, Fulcrum has helped us to tailor our company benefits around a relatively strong local National Health Service. This has resulted in significantly reduced insurance costs without reducing the speed or quality of care. We have always found their honest and pragmatic approach to be a good fit with our own business.”
“With our previous provider, I always felt like ‘just a number’ calling them with any queries – whereas an expert outfit like Fulcrum offers personalised service. After meeting them, we discovered there is much to insurance plan design which can impact massively on premiums”.
“Your team are a credit to Fulcrum. Michelle has been excellent with progress and updates to the schemes we’ve implemented.”
“Fulcrum has helped us to protect more employees, through better plan design.”
“Fulcrum thinks in a much more creative and strategic way than the average broker, and as a result provides a much higher value of service. We have saved approximately £50k in direct costs and far more in management time, as administration is far simpler.”
“Good engineers are thin on the ground and it’s important to us to attract and retain some of the best in the industry. Feedback tells us our employees value the benefits aspect of their package, and we are keen go the extra mile with this. We have found Fulcrum’s service to be second to none, extremely knowledgeable and professional.”
“Our experience with the team at Fulcrum has been nothing short of fantastic. They are friendly, approachable and very quick to respond to any queries. They spend time to explain situations and processes, to ensure that we understand them fully which demonstrates their dedication to great customer service”.
“Fulcrum’s advice and hands on approach has enabled us to provide a competitive and comprehensive Benefits package for our Employees.”
“I was initially sceptical that Fulcrum would be able to help us with our staff benefits packages as I felt we already had good value from providers. However, their careful and methodical analysis, combined with some innovative thinking, ended up with a great result with considerable savings for us. What’s more, the savings kicked in immediately. We continue to be delighted with their service.”
“Through diligent assessment of the market and tough negotiations on our behalf Fulcrum has saved us many thousands of pounds on our staff benefits. As well as major cost savings, the team at Fulcrum are exceptional in their professionalism and customer service”.
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