Trying to design a benefits package for your business that makes everyone on your team happy is rarely an easy task. Far too often, companies simply copy what their competitors are doing or follow the latest industry trends when deciding how to compensate employees.
However, while this logic on its own seems reasonable, offering benefits based on what employees are actually asking for is the best strategy for attracting and retaining top talent.
Gaining insights directly from the individuals who will benefit from the package helps you create a package that delivers genuine value. This feedback should always be the starting point for almost every benefit decision you make.
What Employee Feedback is Important When Creating New Benefits Plans
As much as you might try, the reality is that you’re probably not going to please every single employee with one benefit plan, especially in a larger organization. However, this shouldn’t stop you from gathering helpful feedback from them.
Taking this approach helps you to:
- Understand what benefits employees want/need the most. Getting honest opinions straight from your employees gives you a much clearer and more actionable picture of their current needs and potential requirements in the future. This valuable insight enables you to develop and refine your offerings in a manner that is meaningful to them.
- Get a better return on investment – It can be incredibly frustrating to spend money on company perks and offerings that nobody ever uses. By consulting your employees about the incentives they actually value, you can cut down on inefficient spending and get a much better ROI from the money allocated to your benefits program.
- Improve your company morale – Your employees have their own thoughts and feelings on how the business runs or how they’re compensated. Allowing them to express themselves freely signals that you value their perspectives and are committed to making benefits choices that align with them. That helps to build trust, which is essential for any productive working environment.
The Most Effective Ways to Gather Benefits Feedback
If you really want to benefit from employee feedback, it’s important to offer your staff a variety of different ideas to share their thoughts with the business.
Below are several effective methods for getting that feedback:
Company Pulse Surveys
A lot of businesses get value from sending out short questionnaires to employees to get a broad understanding of their staff’s thoughts on different topics. These company “pulse” surveys can also be useful for collecting input on compensation and perks, ensuring that the decisions you make are lining up with the needs of your workforce.
Conducting these staff check-ins consistently throughout the year offers the added benefit of providing personnel with a means to voice concerns while maintaining anonymity. This is often the best way to get unfiltered feedback on how employees are really feeling and can give you very helpful perspectives to work with.
HR-Driven Focus Groups
It can be really useful to gather employee perspectives directly from structured, in-person discussions. This approach enables you to delve more deeply into the thoughts of employees, providing a better understanding of the reasoning behind some of the feedback you’ve already collected.
Organizing a dedicated roundtable just for discussing the benefits program often sparks constructive exchanges between employees and the management team. It also helps to provide a more visible way for the business to show its commitment to making the right decisions for its employees.
One-on-One Employee Discussions
A good amount of data can be collected by having consistent one-on-one sessions with employees and managers. This also includes exit interviews managed by Human Resources. The private nature of these types of meetings often makes employees feel significantly more at ease when disclosing their opinions.
Exit interviews can be really helpful for this. Employees leaving the organization are often much more candid about their perspectives, making them less inhibited about offering a straightforward review of the business, including its strengths and weaknesses. When taken in the right light, this information can be really helpful for making informed decisions about future benefits programs.
How to Leverage Employee Feedback Data for Building Better Benefits Plans
After gathering enough feedback from your workforce, the real challenge becomes converting that data into a practical roadmap for benefits formatting. Here is an effective method for tackling this process.
Combine and Analyze All Recorded Data
Once all the feedback has been collected, it’s time to mine the data for common threads. Start looking for identical statements or observations that appear when polling different individuals or multiple departments.
If a significant portion of your staff offers similar perspectives regarding specific benefit options, or if they are repeatedly asking for the same changes, that’s a strong signal that an adjustment in that benefit category might be necessary.
Prioritize Changes With The Largest Impact
Once you have a list of potential adjustments, the next step is to determine which ones take precedence. These should be ordered according to the resources required and the likelihood of successful implementation.
you should compare the advantages each change would offer your employees against your business’s ability to sustainably fund changes over the long term.
Don’t Make Too Many Changes at Once
When you’re getting ready to overhaul your benefits options, taking a progressive approach to changes is often the best strategy. Instead of rolling out too many organization-wide revisions all at once, try launching a smaller-scale trial run first and introducing only a handful of minor adjustments.
This progressive approach allows you to gauge staff reaction more effectively and ensures the new benefits format is met with a positive reception from most staff, before rolling out all the changes.
Leverage Employee Opinions to Build Better Benefits Packages
Making a sincere effort to collect and listen to your employees’ feedback allows you to improve your benefits offerings. At the same time, making this effort shows your teams that you value their opinions, which can help to increase team morale and improve staff retention rates over time.
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.
