Employee benefits will not sell without a clear performance target, or measurable return on the investment, experts have said.
Deploying employee benefits in a firm without clear objectives makes the schemes extremely difficult for HR departments to justify, according to Jelf Employee Benefits.
Iain Laws, director of UK healthcare, Jelf Employee Benefits said: "The future of healthcare employee benefits requires a dynamic approach and, even more crucially, an approach that is measurable via key performance indicators (KPI) or a return on investment (ROI).
"Without this in place, companies will find they are still paying for the ill health of their employees rather than moving towards the model of preventing ill health."
The consultants said absence data - the most commonly used KPI for all employee benefit healthcare spend - as a sensible place to start as reducing the amount of time taken off due to sickness is usually a key goal of a health strategy.
Jelf added that once data is robust, objectives can be set and current provision reviewed, before begining to proactively promote benefits to employees.
Laws concluded: "In these challenging times every inch of every organisation is coming under scrutiny from finance. If HR and benefits are to avoid the scissors, they need to be more commercially aware and demonstrate the value they add to an organisation via real quantitative measures."
