A warm welcome to the newest member of our Circle In family, Flybuys. Flybuys is Australia’s most popular loyalty program and is proud to “not be a business as usual kind of place”.
For them, it’s all about walking the talk and building their values into everything they do. This includes providing meaningful support to all their people at all stages of their lives.
Here are some highlights from a recent chat between Product Marketing Manager, Circle In, Sarah Gildea, and Chief People Experience Officer, Flybuys, Fiona Lund.
Why was it important for Flybuys to invest in a program such as Circle In?
One of the main reasons we started thinking about Circle In was around our Parental Leave, so it started there because we were looking at our Parental Leave journey and we found that we had a lot of inconsistency in experience for the person who was going on Parental Leave and coming back, and a lot of it was very much dependent on the line manager and the line manager capability and the type of experience that they got.
At Flybuys, what we wanted to do was to create some greater consistency around that experience, so we started to map out what that would look like and then we started to explore on the market various tools, and other opportunities that we could utilize to leverage people who were much better at this stuff than what we are and we came across Circle In.
The thing that got me about Circle In was the fact that it really helps caregivers across the entire life stage, so whether you’ve got newborns, you’ve got teenagers, you’ve got elderly parents, whatever the case may be, it’s something much broader, and that was really, really appealing to me, in particular, because I thought well actually this has got much better usage, and it’s much more inclusive for a much broader demographic of our workforce, it’s not just for this little bit, so it actually became a much bigger program of work for us. Circle In expanded my little bit of narrow thinking that I had, and I thought, ‘oh this is actually a great opportunity for us’, so I was super excited to learn about all of the information and all of the tools that Circle In provide in a very easily accessible platform, so people can utilize it whenever it suits them because accessibility is really important. It’s great to be utilizing resources at work, you want to be able to use it on your mobile, you want to use it on your desktop, whatever the case may be, so I think it just enhanced where we wanted to take that overarching notion of looking after our people and caring for our people, and particularly those who’ve got caregiving responsibilities, just to give them some more information and a different resource to be able to help with that.
What problem is Circle In solving for Flybuys?
Consistency of experience, and consistency of accessibility of information at the point of need. I think that was always a challenge for us because previously it was always dependent on your line manager and we know that some line managers are better at this stuff than others, and what we wanted to be able to do was to equip our leaders in the business to be able to have the right conversations at the right time with our people. We have this resource, so people can self-serve and actually think ‘I’m really struggling with my teenage son who won’t get off his devices’, or whatever the case may be, so it’s also really enticing from that its point of need information as well because we didn’t have any of that type of information. It is giving people an ability to have a one stop shop, because before it was very fragmented in terms of how they were going to get information and how they get stuff that was going to help them solve their problems, but we really wanted to make sure that we were solving that problem about the consistency of information and the accessibility. They were our two core drivers, and then once you actually get in and look at the platform it just solves lots of information gaps along the entire lifecycle in terms of caregiving. There are lots of benefits and it just enhances that value proposition for our people.
What are you most excited about the platform and the partnership with Circle In?
I can’t wait to showcase Circle In once we launch it, which is very soon. I am really excited about what it absolutely has to offer and I think people will lap it up. People are always hungry for information, particularly when they undergo new experiences so whether that’s with a new baby, looking after elderly parents, whatever the case may be, whatever the life stage that you’re in, and the challenges that you’re facing. It just gives people access to another source. Of course, it doesn’t replace your family, your friends, or the other professionals that you seek advice from in your life, but it just supplements, it gives you another source of information that you can go to. It’s really super powerful and because of how accessible it is, it just makes it super easy for people to access when it suits them, and it gives people control over their lives as well.
The knowledge that it’s provided by your employer is also a really powerful thing to know that your employers got your back and that is helping you take care of the other people in your life that you need to be taking care of, as well as, yourself.
Diversity and inclusion is a really important pillar of our strategy here at Flybuys, as well, and one that is a core pillar of our success is the respect and care that we have for our teams and our people. This is just another way that we can actually demonstrate that care and concern for our people.
What does success look like for Flybuys in supporting your families and caregivers?
You want people to be in the system, utilizing the resources, looking at the information. Obviously, it’s really great uptake and usage. One other measure of success is we’ve got anecdotal conversations that happen in the business where you’ve just got this incidental conversation happening about ‘did you see this article on Circle In?’ and ‘I noticed that you’re in this situation’, or ‘have you had a look here?’, it’s where you’ve got that natural sharing of information across the business. It’s really powerful if it just becomes part of the DNA of our business like it’s a core resource that people find incredibly useful. Those types of more informal incidental conversations we will be looking out for, as well as, usage and uptake.
We’ll also be monitoring those people that use it, we’ll probably do some interviews just to ask what type of information you find useful. Why was it? What’s missing? What’s really important in terms of the relationship between Flybuys and Circle In is that we feed back to you what we find really useful, what is really helpful, but what our people are telling us about what else would they like to see? What else might be helpful in terms of the evolution of your platform? Because that’s how good partnerships typically thrive.
Why Circle In?
Circle In is more holistic. As I said when we started, we did think about it in terms of Parental Leave quite narrowly and there’s a lot of products out there that sort of do focus on that Parental Leave journey and that return to work type of transition, but Circle In is so much broader and it just offers so much more. Therefore it’s applicable and will have much greater relevance to many more people in our organization. From a value-for-money perspective, it’s right up there, because it’s a platform that’s not just for a small population, but it’s a much broader population. That’s why we chose Circle In because it talks about caregiving across the entire lifecycle and you’ve got resources for all of those things so, it’s much more valuable and has much greater utility.
We are proud to welcome Flybuys to our Circle and look forward to supporting their people in all of the moments that matter.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can support your employees, click here to talk to us today.
