Building a Personalized Benefits Package That Improves Employee Engagement and Retention ⋆ Margaret Buj

An essential part of helping your business grow is implementing effective recruitment and onboarding strategies. While bringing in qualified talent to your business is a great first step, keeping them interested in staying long-term is another challenge altogether.

The type of benefits you offer your employees can play a large role in how effective you are in this area. Traditional benefits offerings, while appreciated by many employees, are starting to become the bare minimum in many business settings. Today’s employees are often looking for more unique and personalized offerings to keep them grounded with an employer.

Luckily, there are various approaches you can take to improve the attractiveness of your benefits while helping to reduce your employee attrition. 

How Employee Needs are Changing

To create a workplace where your employees feel actively engaged and appreciated, it’s essential to consider how their needs may have changed over the years:

The Impact of Generational Differences

Not all employees view their circumstances the same way. Most generations have different priorities or needs, especially when it comes to the benefits they receive.

For example, older employees typically have more focus on their retirement plans and adequate healthcare coverage. Younger generations tend to focus less on their long-term planning and may be more interested in their immediate needs. For many, this includes sufficient mental health support or being given opportunities to learn and grow in their careers.

Whatever the preference, when you’re able to understand better who your employees are and what they need, it can help you to create more attractive benefit offerings for everyone. 

Varied Family Structures and Lifestyle Choices

It’s essential to keep in mind that your employees and their family dynamics change considerably over the years. Your team members may come from all types of backgrounds and have different priorities in their lives. Some may get married, have kids, or be caring of their immediate family members.

Because of this, it’s essential to consider the formatting of your benefits packages and how they align with different lifestyle choices. For example, flexible vacation days can be a valuable benefit to offer new parents, while incorporating additional wellness options can be helpful for aging employees or those trying to take better care of their health.

More Awareness Around Physical and Mental Health.

Over the years, there has been a considerable shift in everyone’s understanding of the importance of your health. This not only applies to your physical well-being but also your mental health.

Employees are becoming more aware of how easy it can be to allow stress and added pressure at work and home to cause burnout and negatively impact their quality of life. As an employer, looking for ways to reduce this burden can be incredibly valuable to employees. 

This may mean investing more in quality health insurance coverage while offering access to Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) or other alternatives that help employees create a healthier work-life balance.

Building a More Personalized Benefits Package

To build a benefits package that helps address all your employees’ needs, finding a way to personalize your offerings can be incredibly helpful.

Giving Your Team More Flexibility and Choice

Giving employees more coverage flexibility is a great way to make your benefits more personalized to them. For example, allowing employees to choose their healthcare plans and associated premiums will enable them to tailor their benefits so that they get the most value out of them.

To help facilitate this, consider offering different types of plans, like HMOs or Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). This would give them more options to choose from and increase the likelihood they’ll find something that fits their unique needs.

Helping Your Team with Financial Wellness

Certain employees may be very concerned about their future, especially when it comes to their financial security. One way you can help to reduce this stress is by introducing retirement savings plans like 401(k)s. 

Another way you could support your employees’ financial needs is by including financial wellness programs in their benefits offerings. These programs are designed to provide additional resources to employees, including financial consultants, who can help them evaluate their finances and provide them with long-term budgeting or investment tips.

Gathering and Acting on Employee Feedback

When deciding on the best strategies for creating your employee benefits, sometimes the best resource to use is your actual employees.

The Value of Hearing Directly from Your Employees

There are multiple ways you can encourage your employees to open up about their benefits needs and preferences. For starters, opening up more conversations, whether in-person or in group settings, can be a great way to gather some fresh ideas or perspectives about benefit types most people would find helpful.

Creating anonymous surveys is another easy way to allow employees to share their thoughts or opinions about the benefits provided to them. This format allows employees to be a bit more detailed about their needs without having to worry about privacy concerns.

Digging into the Data: What Your Numbers and External Trends Tell You

While speaking to employees directly can be a helpful way to gather insights about benefits usage, looking into the data provided by your internal benefits platform or outsourced benefits administration teams is another way you can go about this process.

Take the time to review your enrollment data for each employee to gain a better understanding of the preferred forms of coverage. This not only highlights coverage areas you may want to focus more on communicating to your teams, but also helps you to identify specific offerings that may no longer be worth using. The budgets set aside for these benefit types could then be refocused in other areas where they’ll make a larger impact.

Measuring Impact and Iterating

Although you may have spent a lot of time and resources developing a great benefits package, it’s essential to take the necessary steps to make sure it’s continuously hitting the mark for your employees.

Make sure you’re regularly reviewing the benefits coverage you have in place. Use your employee feedback to help you make necessary changes that can help to improve their perceived value over time.

Start Personalizing Your Employee Benefits

Finding ways to personalize your benefits offerings shows employees that you value their contributions and want to ensure they get the most value out of their packages. By considering the changing needs of your staff and applying some of the strategies discussed, you’ll create a working environment that motivates your teams and reduces your employee attrition.

Author Bio: Frank Mengert

Frank Mengert continues to find success by spotting opportunities where others see nothing. As the founder and CEO of ebm, a leading provider of employee benefits solutions. Frank has built the business by bridging the gap between insurance and technology driven solutions for brokers, consultants, carriers, and employers nationwide.

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