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How to use employee feedback to optimize your benefits package
Key takeaways:
Attracting and retaining talent requires employers to offer the right blend of compensation, benefits, and workplace culture. Different employees have different wants and needs. One-size-fits-all benefits packages are no longer good enough. To ensure you're offering benefits that make sense for your unique employees, you need to get to know them and figure out what they want and expect as people.
Employee feedback can help you create better benefits packages and offer the right perks. How do you figure out what your employees want? This guide explains how to collect employee opinions and use them to optimize your benefits packages.
Poll employees about your current benefits packages
Send workers a poll to learn about their attitudes toward your current benefits packages. Depending on the number of employees, you can give them a paper survey and crunch the results, or you can use an online survey platform that generates a report of your results.
Ask about each of the benefits and perks you offer currently and have employees rate their satisfaction on a 1 to 10 scale. Give workers room to share additional comments. Then, ask if they want any particular benefits that you don't currently offer.
Gather feedback in the middle of the year
Ideally, you should gather feedback in the middle of the year. By the summer, your employees will have experienced your benefits package for several months, and they will have a solid sense of how it affects their lives.
This timing also allows their feedback to influence the benefits package you offer next year. You can take into account their thoughts when you choose your benefits in the fall. Then, when you roll them out in the new year, you can be confident they will meet your employees' needs.
Solicit feedback on an annual basis
Your employees' needs and wants may change, and if you want to be competitive, you need to ensure that your benefits package keeps pace. Look at the changes ushered in during COVID-19. As employees worked remotely, they started wanting different benefits.
Flexibility with remote work and paid time off, for example, became more important to employees. Additionally, the financial stress that came along with the pandemic had many people craving financial wellness programs, such as earned wage access or emergency savings accounts (ESAs).
Show interest in your employees
Formal polling can help you learn what your employees want, but to gain additional insights, you need to get to know your employees personally. Show interest in them and cultivate a corporate culture of open communication so you know they're sharing their real feelings.
Talk with your employees about their goals and obstacles deterring them. Ask what they need to reach their goals and get past obstacles. Then, develop your benefits package around that.
For instance, if employees are struggling to find daycare in the face of school closures, you may need to offer remote work options or flexible schedules. If workers are stressed about their finances, you may want to offer benefits that help them to build up an ESA.
Pay attention to non-verbal cues
Sometimes, employees don't know what they want. Or, they may not be aware that certain benefits or perks even exist. Pay attention to your employees' non-verbal cues when trying to figure out what they want.
Do they seem tense during meetings or when given certain assignments? Are they rushed and hurried when they arrive at work? Are they always trying to leave quickly? What type of personal tasks are they doing at work? If you have employees fielding calls from children, checking their bank account balances, or trying to sneak in a quick nap during breaktime, that's a sign you might want to offer benefits that ameliorate those stresses.
Pay attention to industry and labor trends
To figure out what your employees might want, you should also pay attention to industry and labor trends. Unfortunately, employers often don't understand what their employees actually want. Employers have a firm grasp on the importance of wages and salaries of their workers, but they underestimate the importance of benefits.
Only 23% of employers think that benefits packages influence an employee's decision to leave a company. A third of them think that employees only leave for career advancement and flexibility.
However, when you ask employees, you see a different reality. After wages, employees claim their most significant reasons for looking for a new position are benefits, career advancement, and flexibility in that order.
Flexibility is key when you run a business. You need to be flexible enough to withstand market changes, operational disruptions, pandemics, and other challenges. You also need to ensure that you are flexible about how you treat your employees, and that includes crafting a benefits package that makes sense for the unique needs of your employees at this precise moment.
Contact SecureSave to talk about setting up and ESA
Soliciting feedback from your employees about what matters to them is crucial in offering the right benefits packages. Benefits are very important to workers and help them to be more productive.
At SecureSave, we help employers set up ESAs for their employees. Right now, workers are stressed about their finances. A record number of people don't have enough savings to get through a small emergency, and that doesn't just hurt individuals, it also hurts their employers.
When employees are worried about financial issues, they cannot focus at work, and their productivity suffers. In some cases, modest financial emergencies can even prevent them from coming to work. An ESA helps workers get through these situations without letting the stress hurt their professional lives.
To learn more about this high-impact, low-cost, easy-to-implement benefit, contact us today.