Cisco have launched a new online benefits package to their UK and Irish employees in conjunction with Thomsons Online Benefits. The scheme is called i-Benefit@Cisco and is designed to allow employees to interact and enrol in all their benefits.
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) has shaped the future of the Internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for its customers, employees, investors and ecosystem partners and has become the worldwide leader in networking – transforming how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Cisco has over 2,500 employees in the UK and Ireland.
Cisco chose to work with Thomsons to implement and support the online benefits package following an intensive selection process.
i-Benefit@Cisco includes core benefits such as pension, life assurance, income protection and holiday, plus additional benefits employees can choose to fit in with their lifestyle. Salary sacrifice was introduced to generate savings on National Insurance contributions which Cisco put back into the benefit budget with the addition of company paid health assessments as part of its desire to promote a proactive health and wellbeing strategy. Using Thomsons’ technology, employees can now view their personalised total reward statements and make their benefit selections online. The scheme also involved a ‘first’ in the UK market by allowing employees to elect to transfer their old pension scheme to the new scheme completely online with no form filling. This online process was extremely effective with 85 percent of employees completing the transfer process.
Charlie Johnston, HR Director, UK and Ireland comments: “Our reward strategy is driven by our desire to underpin making Cisco a brilliant place to work and help people understand the full breadth of their reward and benefits package, wherever they work and whatever they do. We wanted to drive some real innovation into the delivery of benefits and feel that we have achieved this, although this is only phase one. Since we are such a diverse and growing business, we also wanted to make the most of benefit efficiencies through salary sacrifice and improved administration.
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As a market leader and innovator ourselves, we wanted to use a partner whose technology was market leading and for us Thomsons stood out from the crowd. The launch of i-Benefit@Cisco has been a great success with 94 percent of employees logging into the system. We look forward to continuing to develop i-Benefit@Cisco in the future both in the UK and Ireland and beyond.”
