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 had resulted in a myriad different benefit entitlements and pension schemes, where there was often no consistency in provision to employees.
Working with Thomsons Online Benefits, Live Nation Entertainment planned to deliver an intelligent reward strategy that would mark them out as a leader in benefits provision in an industry sector where employee benefits are not commonly considered of high importance.
Brian Newman, international HR director, Live Nation Entertainment, said: "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 that linked reward with our broader HR strategy – to maximise employee environment, experience and reward.
"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 Nation Entertainment established the Live Benefits proposition – a recognisable brand that perfectly fitted their business and provided a backbone for employee engagement throughout a period of continuous change. As well as introducing online total reward and flexible benefits, Live Benefits also offers employees 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 that provided further savings opportunities and ensured best value against our requirements.
Newman added: "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."
