How to Navigate Flexible Employee Benefits in a Mobile World Without Compromising Security

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Flexible, mobile-enabled benefits are critical to helping your employees better engage with and adopt the packages you offer them. Your company works hard to provide employees with a range of benefits that allow for flexibility and freedom, so why not make it easy for them to access company benefits through their smartphones?

A Benefits App Would Make Employees’ Lives Easier

While you’re paying close attention to the types of benefits you’re offering, are you dialed in to how easily accessible they are for your employees? For example, if someone wants to check their 401(k) balance in the car or access their insurance benefits while at the doctor’s office, how easy is it for them to do that?

Before you add another perk to your benefits package, you need to include “mobile-enabled” on your list of must-haves. Yes, some employees will continue to check their health insurance benefits through the company website, but let’s not forget about a significant percentage of your workforce that likely checks their benefits via mobile devices. When it comes to mobile usage, the average U.S. consumer spends five hours a day on devices, with apps heavily surpassing web usage on these devices. This shows that it’s not enough to offer employees a mobile-ready website; the ideal scenario is an employee benefits app that they can use anywhere, anytime, and from any device.

Keep Employees Safe Online

The prevalence of mobile, both in the workplace and throughout society, means we are basically living our lives through our devices. In fact, 70 percent of the world population will be using smartphones within the next three years, and right now, more people access the internet via mobile devices than on desktop computers. It makes sense that mobile-enabled benefits would be key to helping your employees better engage with and actually utilize the benefits you offer them.

While mobile is ubiquitous, this also means your employees’ digital footprints exist everywhere. In order to protect yourself and your employees, it’s important for your HR team to balance the risk and reward scenarios. Wouldn’t it be nice to offer a mobile-enabled benefit that lets employees know if their identity has been compromised?

An anti-identity theft employee benefit would help keep employees protected 24/7, which is becoming increasingly necessary in today’s digital world. It would also give you peace of mind knowing that if any information gets compromised, your employees would be able to act rapidly to secure their identities. Victims of identity theft can spend anywhere between 33 and 600 hours attempting to recover their identities. You can help employees avoid that outcome.

Your company works hard to provide comprehensive and meaningful benefits to your employees. It’s worth taking the extra step to ensure that those benefits are mobile-ready and secure.

Steven Bearak is the CEO of IdentityForce, a provider of proactive identity, privacy, and credit protection for individuals, businesses, and government agencies.

By Steven Bearak