8 Tips To Improve Your Employee Benefits

Some businesses naturally attract a more diverse workforce, while others are dominated by a small number of demographics. Offering a broad range of benefits is not enough without reflecting on the composition of your workforce and offering benefits that they actually want.

You may have some benefits in place already that, with a little tweaking, could become much more popular. Even if something is already a popular choice, that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. Flexible work is the perfect example of this.

There has been a lot of research conducted into which benefits resonate most with employees. This information can be viewed in the context of various demographics, such as age, geographic location, and employment sector. This information can be extremely useful in pointing you in the right direction, but nothing can be as accurate as surveying your own staff.

No matter what benefits you make available to your staff, it is inevitable that some will be more popular than others. This is not always an issue, as it is a good idea to offer benefits that may not have a wide appeal, but can be very important to some people. However, some benefits may simply be unpopular.

Even if a benefit appears to be in high-demand based on your internal surveys, that does not mean your employees will actually take it up. Pension plans and gym memberships are two examples of benefits that appear more popular on paper than they are in reality. Planning for the future or getting fit sound like great ideas to many people, until the time comes to part with their cash or actually go exercise. By monitoring the uptake of your benefits, you can track what your employees are really using, and eliminate any unnecessary costs.

There won’t always be an easily identifiable reason as to why certain benefits are not proving popular with employees, but one of the most common reasons is that the benefits are never properly explained to them. This is especially true for complex financial matters such as mortgages or pension plans.

By making time to have an expert explain how the benefits work and why employees should sign up, you will greatly increase your participation rates. These can be large presentations that take place a few times a year, although many companies, particularly banks, will be more than happy to send a representative on a weekly basis, allowing your employees to drop by for an unscheduled, private chat.

While it is important to have presentations or events to focus on specific benefits, benefits marketing needs to be a year-round effort. A major mistake many employers make is having a fantastic benefits package, which is all explained in overwhelming detail on an employee’s first day, and never mentioned again.

When making any business decision, you want to have as much information as possible. So even if you have already examined existing research, carried out your own survey, and monitored the uptake of benefits, you still want to get feedback so you can improve the participation rates moving forward.

The option to give anonymous feedback should always be open, but feedback should also be collected on an annual basis. A simple survey can help you figure out why certain benefits are less popular than expected, which is extremely important when it comes to deciding which to keep, which to change, and which to eliminate. Your employees may have stated that they want healthcare, for example, but find the package on offer too expensive or restricted in terms of coverage. In this case, rather than dropping the benefit, you may consider switching providers.

Benefits have been shown to have a major effect on many of the most important KPIs in business, such as employee satisfaction, engagement, productivity, and retention. But in order to achieve the best results, you need as much communication with your staff as possible. By giving them as many opportunities as possible to tell you what they like and what they don’t like, you will give yourself the best chance of providing the right benefits, and reaping the rewards.

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