HR Magazine spoke with Sam Lau, Managing Director, Total Loyalty Company Limited to find out how staff club programmes help HR get more social with their staff. Following 15 years experience in running outsourced staff club programmes for Australian companies, Sam is now bringing the concept to Hong Kong. An innovative solution that helps HR managers reconnect with employees and enhances staff engagement to boot.
What HR benefits can a staff club bring to an organisation?
Having a successful staff club improves staff morale. Not only does it inject the ‘fun’ element back into working life, it also serves as a great informal staff communication platform for HR.
Having a fun workplace with different activities and special offers all the time helps employers to stand out. Those who offer practical, useful benefits—relevant to employee lifestyles—are able to significantly differentiate themselves.
It helps tackle two of the key issues facing many HK companies now—how to offer a better work-life balance and how to get staff more engaged. The staff club concept is not just a set of ‘ideals’ or ‘targets’, but rather practical benefits that staff can relate to individually and use immediately.
Through interesting activities, staff clubs help bring together employees from different parts of the company—breaking down internal barriers and facilitating a more harmonious working environment.
It goes a long way to help companies achieve ‘employer of choice’ status with their staff.
How do Australian staff programmes differ from those in Hong Kong?
Australian companies embraced the work-life balance approach a while ago, and since then companies have been looking at different ways of incentivising, and showing that they care about, their staff. The use of professionally run social clubs as one such solution has been in place for over 15 years in Australia and I was a pioneer in creating this as a new industry. The focus in Australia is very much about organising discounts for employees.
In Hong Kong, we noticed that many companies have really only just started to look for new ways to engage staff. Bearing in mind the busy lifestyle of a typical Hong Kong employee, we have found that helping run staff events has been a real key to our success in the region. Our programmes in Hong Kong, therefore, have been more focused on creating different and unique events for company staff.
How can staff clubs help achieve better work-life balance?
I believe Hong Kong companies have struggled, to date, to come up with practical solutions to provide a better work-life balance for their staff.
Following US and UK models, such as providing flexible working hours and working from home, simply does not fit the Hong Kong working culture.
Companies need to look at something more practical for Hong Kong employees—we all work long hours,
and don’t have time to go and find
really interesting activities to do,
let alone arrange for colleagues to
get together. It gets talked about
over lunchtime but no one actually
has the time, or the inclination, to organise these activities.
Staff also expect that by working for a company of a reasonable size, they are entitled to special offers and benefits. Again this is normally left up to HR to try and source, and usually gets done in a very ad hoc manner.
A staff club is a platform where all these benefits and activities are presented to all staff, giving them instant and regular rewards. By ensuring new offers are continually added to the programme, the staff club becomes the portal through which HR can deliver meaningful lifestyle benefits to their staff
to help enhance their work-life balance.
Why outsource staff social clubs?
Traditionally a staff club is run by enthusiastic individuals within a company, normally without much, if any, recognition or support. In fact, a lot of times when the team goes to a staff club meeting, their involvement is frowned upon by their line managers. Moreover, due to on-going work commitments, efforts to organise social activities are usually very ad hoc. Companies are realising now that this is a hidden cost to them, sometimes quite substantial, if you add up the hours spent by HR organising social events and/or benefits for their staff.
Running staff clubs has never been seen as a ‘core business’ for any company, so the outsourcing model fits here well—where an external organisation, specialised in this area, helps deliver better and cheaper solutions.
In the TLC model, we ensure that every programme run still remains very much the company’s own staff club. We do not take over the club—we simply provide all the supporting resources to the staff club committee. It is still branded as their club, their members, their benefits—we just do all the tasks the staff club committee do not have the time to do.
What companies benefit most from outsourcing staff social clubs?
Staff club outsourcing best suit companies with 100-1000 staff, as these companies know that they want to have more benefits and events for their staff, but just do not have the resources to do so. Their HR team is normally working flat out, with a backlog of projects they want to roll out.
Outsourcing frees up extra resources to help them, without the need to increase headcount. We have found that companies in sectors such as banking, IT, legal and accounting tend to embrace the concept of outsourced staff clubs more readily than others.
What are the biggest challenges to making staff clubs successful?
There are two key areas to making staff clubs successful: variety and communication.
The trap many staff clubs fall into is they only offer very limited events—and often they are simply the ones the organisers themselves want to do, which can alienate many colleagues.
A successful staff club needs to ensure there is a genuine variety of activities offered that cater to all staff. There must be something for everyone including family activities, sporting events, arts and crafts activities and adventure activities. This diversity should also be reflected in the nature of special offers that are made available to staff. There must also be regular and consistent communications issued to staff—so they all look forward to regular updates, whether via weekly email or on posters in the pantry/staff canteen.
With outsourced solutions focused on the logistics of staff clubs, HR is left to focus on the KPIs of the events, ensuring staff are engaged in the programmes, thereby maximising their value.
At the end of the day, happier staff and happier HR is likely to be good news for engagement, productivity and, ultimately, the bottom line.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
