"My Rewards has created a broad awareness of the value proposition Best Buy has to offer to employees. That is the first step toward making our total rewards strategy a success. Now we can focus on helping employees make the best decisions." - Kevin Beckel, Director-HR Operations

Challenge

Best Buy operates a global portfolio of brands with a commitment to growth and innovation. Its total rewards strategy is designed to support the business strategy by driving innovation and performance among employees. With a competitive set of benefits in place, the HR team began searching for a mechanism to help them communicate the total value of the employment proposition and drive the right behaviors. Best Buy identified three critical components:

• Awareness. Employees would easily gain an awareness of what their total rewards package is and what is available to them.
• Learning: Employees would have the tools they need to help them learn about their total rewards options.
• Action: Employees would have the ability to take action from one location.

The goals were straightforward, but not easy. Merely creating awareness across a decentralized, 140,000-strong workforce would pose a challenge. Best Buy needed a powerful and far-reaching solution.

Solution

The solution came in the form of an employee intranet site developed by Hewitt. Your Total Rewards (called My Rewards at Best Buy) is a single source of personalized total rewards information, providing employees with a holistic and accurate view of what's offered today, plus tools and information that encourage the employee to take action to maximize value tomorrow.

The Best Buy team saw beyond the site's impressive features and functionality to a vision of a portal through which employees could access all of their benefits sites—from health and welfare to employee stock purchase and long-term incentives. Kevin Beckel, Director-HR Operations, likens the experience of visiting My Rewards to taking a stroll down the candy aisle: From this single site the employee can easily see, learn about, and access the full range of benefit offerings available to him or her.

Results

Best Buy's vision became reality when My Rewards was used as the portal for the 2008 annual benefits enrollment process. The plan was that employees would spend time in My Rewards learning about the full scope of their total rewards before moving on to benefits enrollment. The strategy worked. Not only did utilization of My Rewards jump from 38% to 60% in four weeks, but more importantly, employees spent a significant amount of time reviewing their total rewards before accessing the open enrollment tool.

With confidence that more employees are aware of and utilizing their total rewards options, the HR team feels better prepared to evaluate whether the programs they've designed are working. With their dedication to continuous improvement, the Best Buy team is well on its way to driving the innovation and growth the company desires.