The job market remains as competitive as ever, and employers everywhere are seeking top talent to support clients and contribute to the overall success of their organizations. Employee benefits offerings play a significant role in the likelihood of an applicant choosing your company or current employees choosing to stay with you.
While we all wish improving employee benefits was as easy as snapping our fingers, the reality is that the complexity of the US health insurance system and the sheer number of potential benefits to consider makes that nearly impossible. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do.
By individualizing your offerings, improving affordability, and informing your employees, you can transform your typical employee benefits plan into a robust strategy tailored to the needs of your team and company.
Individualize Your Offerings
Individuality is a cherished American value, and it means something different to each of us. In the context of employee benefits, offering individualized benefits creates an environment that’s positioned to support the unique experiences and needs of your employees. Multiple health plan designs, regional network options, coverage tiers, and voluntary insurance options are all examples of individuality in an employee benefits strategy.
In the broader context of your Total Rewards – which encompass your benefits, compensation, and other perks employees can receive from your organization – many companies are utilizing Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to support different employee experiences, foster inclusivity, and strengthen their overall community. In addition to offering another element of individuality to your employee benefits strategy, ERGs can also enhance your employee communication by creating connections between employees across your enterprise.
When considering individualized offerings for your employee benefits, the first step is to determine what your employees really want. Understanding which benefits currently resonate with employees and identifying opportunities to boost those benefits or add new ones starts with a conversation!
Improve Affordability
There is no simple path to affordability for employees or employers when it comes to health insurance. Medical trends and inflation continue to apply significant cost pressure to benefit packages.
Addressing affordability requires a nuanced and thoughtful strategy with long-term incremental steps. However, there are a few things you can do immediately to improve affordability for your team and company.
Medical Contract Review
Understand and measure where the total administrative and fixed costs are within your contract. By examining administrative fees, pharmacy revenue, network access fees, ad hoc charges, and all shared savings fees, you can determine what is actually being captured by the insurance carrier.
Benchmark
By using the contract review and input from larger data sets about your program design, you can begin to negotiate your fees, premiums, and plan design. Require your carrier partner to bring forward your contract to align with modern and clarified definitions of key pricing components to create opportunities for savings.
ROI Analysis
Complete an inventory on your current vendors and point solutions. Look for any overlap of services and ask your vendors to complete their own ROI analysis to prove what they are providing for you. Identify which programs and benefits have seen the most positive engagement from your employees and are producing a clear ROI. Double down on these areas and eliminate those that aren’t performing.
Inform Your Employees
Communication is key competency of any successful employer, when it comes to managing their employee benefits programs. To curate information for your campaign, make sure you’re seeking feedback through multiple channels throughout the year – a random survey every now and then won’t provide the information you need to communicate effectively.
To craft an impactful communication campaign, you’ll need to:
- understand how and when employees want to receive information.
- Request direct feedback on what works, and
- leverage technology to monitor which approaches offer the most email click-through and open rates.
Don’t rely on a single distribution method – you’ll need to utilize traditional and innovative approaches to get your message across.
Your Team Deserves Expert Support
Improving your employee benefits won’t happen overnight, but individualizing your offerings, improving affordability, and keeping your employees informed will enhance your plan more effectively than throwing new and trendy benefits at your employees and seeing what sticks without any intention or direction. By capturing feedback and data from your team, you can ensure your benefits are meeting the needs of your current employees and attracting the best talent for your company.
You don’t have to navigate the world of employee benefits alone. Our Employee Benefits experts are committed to caring for your unique potential and taking your employees benefits plan to the next level with industry expertise and insight. Reach out today and let’s get started!
