FLEXIBLE BENEFITS
Live Nation Entertainment launches online reward
Live Nation Entertainment has launched a new online total reward and flexible benefits scheme for its permanent UK employees in conjunction with Thomsons Online Benefits.
Background
Live Nation Entertainment is the largest live entertainment company in the world, consisting of five businesses: concert promotion and venue operations, sponsorship, ticketing solutions, e-commerce and artist management. It employs a diverse group of employees from office workers to stage crew across a number of different sites.
Acquisition and TUPE activity, including the recent merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, resulted in a myriad of different benefit entitlements and pension schemes – where there was often no consistency in provision to employees.
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Aims
Following the selection of Thomsons Online Benefits, Live Nation Entertainment embarked on an “ambitious journey” to ensure that it delivered an “intelligent reward” strategy. The company’s aim was to mark itself out as a leader in benefits provision, in an industry where employee benefits are not commonly considered of high importance.
Brian Newman, International Human Resources Director, Live Nation Entertainment explains: “Previously benefits fell between HR and finance and wasn’t a key driver in our business. As an HR team, we needed to establish the business case for bringing benefits into HR to hook in senior management, which meant ensuring that we would derive maximum value from our reward spend and proving a demonstrable return-on-investment. In addition we needed to build an integrated approach which linked reward with our broader HR strategy – to maximise employee environment, experience and reward”.
He adds: “As well as these corporate goals, we wanted to ensure that we kept the needs of our people at the heart of what we were doing and particularly to offer them long-term financial security and planning opportunities, this meant getting subjects such as pension planning onto their to-do lists! At the heart of our business is an understanding of what our audiences want and my aim was to apply exactly the same principles this project for its intended audience – our hard working employees”.
“Live Benefits” proposition
In conjunction with Thomsons Online Benefits, Live Nation Entertainment established the “Live Benefits” proposition – a “recognisable brand that perfectly fitted” its business, and provided a backbone for employee engagement throughout a period of continuous change.
Live Benefits offers:
online total reward and flexible benefits
a range of voluntary benefits such as cycle-to-work scheme, restaurant discounts and childcare vouchers.
All benefits providers were also reviewed as part of the project which provided further savings opportunities and ensured best value against the company’s requirements.
A final word
“We are absolutely delighted that the vision we set out to achieve of transforming our reward strategy into something industry leading has been achieved. The launch has been incredibly well received by senior management and employees alike, with many employees making selections from the options available on the site, which shows the value it is adding to our benefits proposition; furthermore it gives us an excellent platform for future growth and change in our business.” - Brian Newman, International Human Resources Director, Live Nation Entertainment.
Want to know more?
Thomsons Online Benefits “aims to help businesses get the maximum benefit from their employee reward schemes”. Further information can be found at www.thomsons.com.
Live Nation Entertainment “seeks to innovate and enhance the live entertainment experience for artists and fans: before, during and after the show”. In 2009, Live Nation sold 140 million tickets, promoted 21,000 concerts, partnered with 850 sponsors and averaged 25 million unique monthly users of its e-commerce sites. For additional information, visit www.livenation.com/investors.