In recapping the insights shared in our webinar, “Maximizing Employee Benefits Utilization: Strategies for Success,” we’ve covered the importance of aligning your benefits with your company culture and trends in the benefits landscape, along with some tips to help you effectively communicate about your benefits.
So, once you have those important strategies in place, how do you measure your benefits’ effectiveness? Here are some helpful do’s and don’ts from the perspectives of TC Riley, Cariloop’s Senior Director of Data, Analytics and Research.
Do:
Get access to data wherever and however you can.
Along with internal sources you can use to capture data, lean on your benefit vendors, like Cariloop, to help you get the insights you need. While we’re committed to data privacy, we can work with anonymized, aggregate data to help you gain visibility into what could be most helpful to your workforce. Don’t hesitate to ask vendors and partners about success strategies that have worked for their other clients.
Analyze the data through multiple lenses.
When you look at how many employees are enrolling in and utilizing their benefits, see if you can dig deeper to get a better understanding of the value they see. How much is each benefit impacting the specific people who use it? Are there groups of people in your company who your benefits aren’t resonating with, and if so, what are the factors that limit their engagement? Look at as many segments of your workforce as possible to ensure your offerings are truly inclusive and don’t benefit some groups over others.
Survey your employees directly.
Having raw data on employee enrollment and utilization is important, but it doesn’t always show you the full picture of how your people’s benefits are working for them. Whether conducted via forms distributed company-wide or through 1:1 interviews, surveys are a powerful tool to get to the heart of employees’ experiences so you can understand how well their needs are being met by your current offering.
Have an open-door policy with employees for feedback and suggestions.
Express genuine interest in getting feedback from your employees and encourage them not to be shy about how they feel about their benefits. When they do share their feedback, thank them individually for their generosity. A personal response can go a long way toward making them feel heard—even if you can’t implement their feedback right away. Keep a running list of employee suggestions at the ready during your regular review of your benefits options, so you can identify solutions that address the greatest needs and report back about what you’re able to implement.
Don’t:
Be afraid of data.
While measuring and analyzing employees’ personal experiences can feel counter-intuitive (if not intimidating), quantifying the success of your benefits will help you improve your tactics in the long run. For example, the HR team at Hylant implemented scorecards to measure the value employees get from their benefits over time, so they can quickly identify trends and take action. When they noticed that new hires had the lowest engagement levels with certain benefits, they were able to add more specific messaging into onboarding communications to educate them.
Consider any one KPI to be the end-all-be-all.
As HR leaders, you may feel under pressure to prioritize improving one particular key performance indicator—whether that’s utilization, activation, enrollment or any other metric that matters to your team. Keep in mind and convey to your leaders that, while important, any single percentage can’t tell the whole story.
Get too lost in the numbers.
As you quantify what you can, remember that the most critical measure of a benefit’s success is your employees’ perception of the value it provides. Stay curious about their individual experiences so you can keep making benefits decisions that will make a meaningful difference in their lives, and in the lives of their loved ones.
Catch up on our insights in our previous posts, or check out the full webinar recording here.
