What are the most common mistakes to avoid when adapting employee benefits to changing business needs?

It is important to make employees equally important in your vision, mission statement. To make that, employee benefits must be in management’s mind when they develop organisation strategies. Those days are gone when client centric strategies are designed. Now, it is more on 3 equal footing i.e. Client, Employee and stakeholders.

Focusing on the wrong issues. Most benefit problems arise from misalignment with culture, community, and cost. For example, 65% to 85% of health insurance spend is claims. To get a handle on claims an employer needs to become a much better buyer of employee benefits. Examine all buying options to find the best combination for your business. Once long term cost is optimized an employer can examine relative value trade offs to drive specific culture, community, and business outcomes.

Subtle line between involving employees in the benefit design and creating an unintentional caretaking culture. Best practice, establish an benefits committee whose members are employee thought leaders from each business unit. Meet with committee as part of the pre-renewal strategy meeting. Listen to their concerns and ideas. Seek to explore their input through the renewal process. Meet again as the renewal and offering is being finalized, have committee participate in any cost or design or offering trade off decisions. Highlight the committee and its contribution in the open enrollment materials, process, and meetings. Having thought leaders amongst the workforce helps establish positive "water cooler" benefit discussions.

Conducting an employee survey is necessary when your company plans to change or implement a new benefit. First, Know your employees. Such as their age range, marital status and the size of the family. Second, design your questionnaire based on the overall employee structure or the data from your census report. Third, annouce and release the survey, encourage your employees active engagement by various of communication effort.

In theory this is great baseline of what should be done but the practicalities can be more challenging. Each workforce has its own way of communicating with the employees and you need to observe what's most effective. An example is an accountancy will be able to communicate in a completely different style to a manufacturer. Understanding that language may have to change between departments and the way you use media will have a big impact. Often we will find that areas of high usage are great for posters but when you see an area and it has 10 posters the effectiveness will be impacted. Best tip here is to start with a blank slate and ask the workforce how they want to be communicated with.

Employees on are mobile and often deskless. Use all the tools available. Employers can get a higher open rate with text messaging. Texting is the most effective way to create an informed engaged mobile deskless workforce. Deliver alerts, updates, and announcements to staff whenever, wherever and right to their phone. Connect every person in your organization to the HR, benefits, training and resources they need to thrive. All made easy and accessible, right on their phone. There are several text platform options, definitely worth exploring. I like TruHu.

We’ve seen employers eliminate certain benefits based on the need to save money and potentially the benefits utilization of that specific program is low. At a minimum, explore reducing the funding, if possible, as a first step. Alternatively, update the benefit to a voluntary offering before terminating it completely from your benefits menu. Just because it hasn’t been heavily utilized as of late does not mean it’s not valued, this is especially true of insurance based benefits like disability, life, long term care, and supp health.