Why Employee Feedback Is The Key to Smarter Benefits Strategy

It isn’t always easy to create a compensation package that speaks to each of your employees in the same way. Many times, businesses rely on industry benchmarks or other resources to help them decide which offerings they should focus on that help to support both recruitment and staff retention efforts.

However, one of the most direct paths to ensuring your benefits offerings provide the value your employees are looking for the most is by asking them yourself. Employee feedback can be a crucial element in building a comprehensive benefits package, helping you shape your strategies moving forward.

Why Employee Feedback is Crucial to Benefits Planning

Depending on the size of your organization, there's a good chance that pleasing everyone with the structure of your benefits offerings isn’t possible. The only way to ensure that the investments you’re making will actually resonate the way you hope is to gather their feedback. This helps you to:

• Pinpoint What Your Team Needs. When you extract actual insights from your teams, you get a better real-world picture of their current and ongoing needs. This helps you to structure your offerings in a way that resonates.
• Optimize Your Benefits Spending. The last thing you want to do is invest in benefits packages that no one uses. Gathering feedback from employees on which benefit types are most preferred helps you optimize your operational spending and extract more ROI from your investments.
• Build More Employee Trust. Employee feedback isn’t just valuable for giving you more helpful information to build optimal benefits packages. The gesture in itself shows employees that you truly value their opinions and want to make decisions based on their needs. This builds additional trust with your staff, which creates more positive working environments.
• Improve Morale and Drive Productivity Levels. When employees feel that their personal and financial needs are satisfied by the business, they are more likely to enjoy what they do for work. This drives productivity levels higher and can significantly reduce turnover rates.

Key Channels for Gathering Employee Feedback

In order to get a clear picture of what your employees truly want in their benefits packages, you’ll want to come up with different formats they can use to share their thoughts.

Here are three examples of ideal feedback formats:

1. Surveys and Pulse Checks

Surveys are a common format used by businesses to gain a broader understanding of how employees feel on various topics. Pulse checks can also be used to extract their thoughts and feelings about their benefits packages, helping the business ensure its decisions are closely aligned with their actual needs.

The benefit of conducting such checks regularly throughout the year is that it allows employees to voice any concerns they may have anonymously, providing you with the most accurate portrayal of their actual thoughts.

2. Focus Groups and Roundtables

Sometimes it can be helpful to hear what your employees have to say about their benefits packages face-to-face. This gives you the opportunity to not only hear what types of coverage options are preferred, but also “why.”

Establishing a focus group or roundtable discussion focused on benefit structures can also help create engaging discussions between employees and management, while allowing the business to express its interest in all employees and their ongoing needs.

3. One-on-Ones and Exit Interviews

Another way you can collect valuable benefits feedback from employees is during one-on-one manager discussions or as HR teams initiate exit interviews. Both scenarios provide employees with a more private setting in which they can openly share their feelings.

Exit interviews can be particularly helpful in this regard, as employees are often the most candid about their feelings. They may be more direct about what they like or don’t like about the business and can potentially provide helpful insights on how you can improve your overall employee compensation strategy.

How to Turn Feedback into Benefits Strategy

Once you’ve made the effort to gather employee feedback, it’s time to turn that information into a new benefits strategy for your teams. Below are some helpful tips for achieving this:

Analyze the Data for Patterns

After collecting feedback, start to analyze the data and look for repeat patterns across different employees or departments. If you find that the majority of your employees tend to provide similar feedback on certain benefits choices or request similar offerings, there is a good chance that adjustments in these areas are worth looking into.

Prioritize Initiatives Based on Impact and Feasibility

Once you’ve made a shortlist of different benefits coverage ideas, prioritize them based on their potential financial impact and feasibility. A good time to confirm this in the U.S. is after ACA reporting deadlines are met and you have the most accurate data to work with. Consider how much value each change could potentially have on employees and whether or not the changes are viable long-term.

Run a Pilot Program

If you’re considering a wide range of benefits changes for your business, it’s a best practice to test the waters before fully committing to wide-scale shifts. Running a pilot program where you make smaller changes first can help to ensure you’re getting the response you hope for from employees and not disappoint more people than you think.

Listening to Employees Isn’t Just Good HR – It’s Good Business

Taking the time to gather employee feedback concerning your benefits offerings doesn’t just help you optimize your compensation packages —it also shows employees that their opinions matter. Over time, this can lead to increased employee morale and reduced staff turnover, helping you to grow your business sustainably.

Contributed to EO by Frank Mengert, founder and CEO of ebm, a leading provider of employee benefits solutions that bridge the gap between insurance and technology-driven solutions.