Lightbox Reward’s flagship product Lightbox is an online employee communication platform focusing on employee benefits. Employers can use the platform to promote their benefits package and to manage employees’ flexible benefits choices. Lightbox is branded for each company and customised to reflect their benefit structure and choices. Functionality can be categorised as follows;
Communication and promotion of benefits
Lightbox gives employers the tools to raise awareness of the benefits that are available to their workforce. The Total Value Statement provides a summary of the key advantages and value of each benefit. More detail is available on each benefit in the company’s tone of voice with no restriction on the amount of content that can be included. Documents can be hosted and we can include useful links to providers where necessary. Lightbox has an employer administration level that controls the employee experience. This creates an agile system that can react instantly to changes in benefits and how they are communicated to staff. Employers can also use the automatic email function to trigger timed and personalised emails to their workforce. Providing employees with a single site to learn about and engage with their benefits also reduces the burden on HR Departments.
Management of flexible benefits
Lightbox Flex is an interactive tool enabling employees to make benefit selections. Costs to the employee are shown in real time as each benefit is selected, or interacted with. The cost of each benefit can be configured to be deducted from either payroll or a flexible benefits budget. The specific rules for each benefit choice are incorporated to ensure that each choice is valid. This is vital to ensure that providers don’t reject choices, and to ensure consistency between payroll and benefit cost. Employers can download reports for onward transmission to both payroll and each benefit provider. Customers of Lightbox Reward have saved up to three weeks of time at renewal in comparison to using a manual process.
Employee engagement modules
Lightbox has a selection of employee engagement tools; a social noticeboard, a recognition scheme, health and wellbeing and learning and development. A social noticeboard can build social glue in the workplace. Peer to peer recognition helps to align employee behaviour with corporate culture. Improving the wellbeing of employees has been shown to reduce absenteeism and increase productivity. Employee led learning and development empowers employees to take greater control of their career path. When enabled, these modules also increase traffic to Lightbox which helps to achieve the corporate goal of raising the awareness of their benefits package.
Account management
It is vital for employers to engage their workforce with their benefits. Lightbox Reward provides an ongoing quarterly account management call to help employers make the most of the functionality available on Lightbox. This ultimately helps to maximise the value of their total benefits spend.
Lightbox was originally designed and produced by Wealth Management and Employee Benefits Consultancy Mearns & Company in 2011, to provide a communications solution for their corporate clients. Their customer’s requirements were not met by any solution available in the market at the time when the platform was originally developed.
As more users were added, it became clear that there was a greater opportunity to bring this software to the wider market, and in 2015 a separate company, Lightbox Reward, was created to develop Lightbox further and take the platform to the market. In early 2016 version 3 of Lightbox was launched.
Lightbox included enhancements to design and user experience, but it was the addition of an administration level that was the biggest functionality improvement. This dashboard level provides employers with control of their own installation of Lightbox, and the benefits content that is seen by their workforce.
In early 2017 Lightbox Flex was launched. This tool allows employers to use Lightbox to manage employee choices from simple voluntary benefits to full flexible benefits schemes efficiently and with minimal manual intervention. With the introduction of Lightbox Flex, Lightbox Reward enables businesses to offer traditionally complex flexible benefits schemes to their workforce, with minimum administrative impact on HR departments.
Malcolm Steel – Product Direction
Catherine Bell – Operations
Mike Wilson – Business Development
Rob Maclean – Design
Euan Glasgow – Finance
Margaret Mearns – Culture
