Benefits are a big component to an employee compensation plan. While they are costly for employers, benefits are a huge part of how employees choose a job and how long they stay.
Here are four ways to keep employees with benefits, and how incorporating rewards can sweeten the deal further.
- Get Employee Feedback: Whether it’s a formal focus group, an online survey, or even just informal lunch chats, get your employees’ feedback on your benefits packages. They are the end user, so it’s important that you put time and care into creating a desirable product for them. Remember, this may not just be their livelihood, it often helps them care for their families too.
- Offer Customized Plans: Increasing flexibility in benefits plans increases overall participation in the program. Engaged employees that understand and use their full benefits are employees whose benefits help retain them within their organization. That is the ultimate metric for success for employers. Offering customizable plans for employees so they can take full advantage of the plan, leaves employees satisfied with what they pay for, and greater participation gives employers satisfaction and ROI in what they offer.
- Improve Communication: Benefits can help retain employees but can also be extremely confusing. Providing employees detailed, easy to understand communication can be the key to participation and employee satisfaction. After the initial company-wide communication is offered, plan to follow up either individually or on an as-needed basis with small groups. Making sure employees understand benefits, can improve overall employee satisfaction ratings.
- Improve Wellness Programs: Original iterations of wellness programs involved biometric screenings, feedback forms and meetings about health and well-being. However, now it has been proved by new research from Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine that employees who incorporated just 2.5 hours of exercise in their schedule each week had fewer absences. So what should employers do? Encourage the behavior that leads to a healthy life. Stop talking about it and get out there! This puts the benefits package into action by actually helping employees get healthier, rather than giving them strategies that they may or may not use.
