Knowing which benefits to offer can be as difficult as eating soup with chopsticks. It’s super easy to offer benefits packages that we think our employees are enjoying, without any data to back us up.
Well here’s some chilling data for you…
According to Isio’s new study, employers are spending around 15 billion pounds a year on employee benefits that are not being used by their staff! The study even went on to show that only 23% of employees said their employer's benefits package matched their needs.
Yikes!
Before you throw in the gauntlet and completely lose hope in benefits packages, it’s important to remember why you’re offering them in the first place.
With the war for talent raging, attracting and retaining top talent has become more challenging than ever. Although not the cure, a tailored, iron-clad employee benefits package is a powerful tool for attracting and retaining the best talent.
To remind yourself of the advantages of offering a strong benefits package, take a look at this article.
With our ultra-competitive environment, here’s how you can measure the success of your benefits package:
- Track your employee engagement with their benefits
Historically, employee engagement has always been quite a tricky thing to pin down and measure.
Traditionally, you would have to carry out the tedious task of setting and tracking employee key performance indicators (KPIs) such as average task completion rate, revenue per employee, profit per employee, blah, blah, blah…
Thankfully, with Ben’s intuitive flexible benefits platform, you can finally kiss those days goodbye.
With built-in insights and reporting capabilities, Ben shows you exactly how and where your benefits are being used.
This means that all your data is in one place with a customised dashboard, you get real-time insight into what benefits are performing better, and you can track where every penny goes with detailed spending reporting.
With such an easy-to-use interface, configuring new benefits, modifying existing benefits packages, or even axing poor-performing benefits couldn’t be made any easier.
- Collect feedback through regular employee pulse surveys
When done correctly, employee satisfaction surveys are a great way to assess the outcome of your employee benefits strategy.
Surveys can help HR professionals like yourself to understand how their employees use the benefits, what they find valuable, and any improvements employees want to make.
However, if you’re carrying out a survey, it is important to ask open-ended questions that allow your employees to provide more detailed feedback.
Questions like:
"What benefits do you use most frequently?" or
"What would you like to see added to the package?"
Can allow for a more detailed conversation with your employees.
You’ll want to carry out surveys frequently enough to make impactful improvements, but sparingly enough that your employees don’t just roll their eyes when they have ‘yet another’ survey to complete during their workday.
Remember the golden rule:
Happy employees = better business performance.
- Speak to your team directly
This is a bit more finicky to track.
However, noticing an increase in employee motivation and participation is a great indicator that investing in your benefits is paying off.
- Attracting more and higher quality employees
It goes without saying that if your benefits package is great, you’ll have an influx of talent rushing to apply to any open positions you have.
Let's say there was a company that offered free, brand-new Bentleys to each of their employees.
They’d have an unlimited candidate pool of the best talent begging for a role.
While we don’t know what your benefits package looks like, we’re pretty sure no Bentleys are being given away. Nonetheless, the benefits package you do create needs to be equally as enticing to potential employees.
A good indication that your benefits package is successful is through examining your hiring process. If your company regularly has a large number of high-quality candidates applying, your benefits package is likely enticing them to join your team.
The question you may be asking yourself is “How exactly do I know what benefits my employees want?”
We get it.
Benefits can be complex. Ben takes the guesswork out of choosing what benefits to offer. In other words, Ben allows your employees to choose the benefits that work best for them.
With flexible benefits, your employees can automatically opt-in and out of the benefits they want. Even better, with their Ben Mastercard, employees get to choose what they want to spend their company allowance on. To learn more about flexible benefits and the Ben card, take a look at this article.
- Increased employee retention
Similar to attracting employees, if a high percentage of your employees are sticking with you for the long haul, that is a good sign that your benefits package is performing well.
Shockingly yet unsurprisingly, Isio’s study indicated that employees who were dissatisfied with their benefits package were 60% more likely to quit their jobs.
Your best employees will want to stay with you if your benefits package helps them in their day-to-day lives and guarantees them job security in an uncertain economy. But if your benefits package is not tailored to the needs of your employees, they will easily jump ship to a competitor’s much juicier package.
As a matter of fact, after investing resources in a wave of new hires, JBM had a similar problem.
They weren’t sure if their gym membership benefits package was enticing enough to retain their top talent.
Well, that was before they offered Ben’s flexible benefits package and tracked their engagement using our platform. Click here to learn more about how JBM has managed to reach a 98% retention rate since using Ben.