Elan Computing serves up tasty benefits with thomsons online benefits

Elan Computing is the world's largest IT&T recruitment company with 55 offices worldwide and are part of Manpower Inc.

Although Elan already offered its employees a generous benefit package, it felt that they were not well understood or appreciated by many of their staff. As a market leader in the recruitment sector, Elan wanted to use their benefits to support their business growth by helping to attract and retain employees, thereby differentiating them in a very competitive marketplace.

In the process of improving communication, Elan's HR team also wanted to reduce the administrative burden of running their benefits and to ensure that they had proper management information at their disposal to develop their future reward strategy.

Elan selected thomsons online benefits to help them launch a flexible benefits scheme, implement a new group personal pension and then to implement their “Perquisite" software to enable employees to enrol into their benefits, and then to access and manage their benefits whenever they wish.

Elan created a new benefit brand for the package called “Central Perks”, a play on the well known café that appeared in the TV series “Friends”. The concept of Central Perks was chosen as the name is well known and easy to relate to for their relatively young workforce both in the UK and internationally.

Central Perks offered Elan's employees a range of:
• Flexible benefits such as a group personal pension, private medical insurance, dental cover, childcare vouchers, charitable donations, gym membership;
• Core benefits including income protection cover, holiday, life cover, health screening, share option scheme, season ticket loans, and an EAP service;
• Voluntary benefits including financial health checks, personal loans, discounted holidays, travel insurance, spa days, wine club, baby products and eye care vouchers.

In addition employees were offered the opportunity to sacrifice some salary into the pension or for childcare vouchers.

Following the initial launch in the UK, Elan are now planning to roll out Central Perks globally.

Ade Atekoja, Payroll & Benefits Manager at Elan comments: “Central Perks has received a great reception from employees showing that we made the right decision to implement flexible benefits. We are very excited, and hope to extend it to the rest of our global operations. For the first time our management team believe they are getting value for money from their expenditure on benefits.”
“When embarking on this project, we were looking for a partner who could manage the whole process, from the consulting through to the implementation and technology. We found this in droves with thomsons online benefits who have provided an expert delivery from start to finish.”

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About thomsons online benefits
thomsons online benefits was founded in 2000 to revolutionise the way that benefits are administered and communicated. They have won the following awards "Corporate Adviser of the Year" in the Money Marketing Financial Services Awards 2004 and 2005, "Most Effective Use of an International Benefits Strategy" in the Employee Benefits Awards 2004, "Advanced Supply Chain Integration" National Innovation category and "E-business" for London region in the DTI Ecommerce Awards 2004. thomsons online benefits is an appointed representative of AWD Consultancy Ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Further information can be found at www.thomsonsonlinebenefits.com