Now that the pandemic has redefined work-life balance and increased the amount and the kinds of support employees need to thrive, employer-provided benefits have become more important than ever to engaging and retaining the employees you have, and to recruiting the people you need.
Along with compensation, a sense of purpose to their work, and the opportunity for advancement, benefits can mean the difference between keeping or losing quality employees. In fact, in the case of executive level Baby Boomers (age 48-65), additional benefits rank as the number one most effective retention initiative.1
Engagement and retention pay off
The importance of increasing engagement through benefit enhancement can’t be ignored. A study by the Workplace Research Foundation found that employees who are highly engaged are 38% more likely to offer their employers above-average productivity.2 In contrast, each year, employees considered actively disengaged cost the United States between $483 billion and $605 billion in lost productivity.3 Keep in mind that many companies have a significant challenge and opportunity when it comes to building engagement. A Gallup poll taken before the pandemic found that only 34% of workers are engaged—and that was the highest percentage in all the years the company had been tracking that metric.4
Benefits are key to recruiting
Similarly, benefits are a major part of the equation for successful recruitment. In fact, for many organizations, recruiting top talent is a one of the top concerns for the company. A survey by professional services giant PwC found that 78% of US CEOs were worried about being able to attract highly qualified talent, and 65% were concerned about their ability to meet the needs of the changing demographics of the employees they need to hire.5 The cost of not being able to build the teams you need is enormous. A 2018 Hays salary survey found that 92% of companies experienced higher turnover and lower productivity due to an inability to hire skilled employees.6 The good news is that, in one 2018 employee survey, 80% of respondents said they would choose a job with benefits over an identical job that offered a 30% increase in salary.7
What’s the bottom line? Offering relevant benefits to a generationally diverse workforce is essential. According to a study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), companies that offer benefits strategically, with an eye toward improving recruiting and retention, do better in both those categories and enjoy 24% better overall performance than organizations that don’t.8
It’s not just what you offer. It’s how you offer it.
But a successful benefits program requires more than a strategic selection of the benefits themselves. A benefit is only as good as the experience an employee has in accessing it—and it’s here that many company benefit programs fall short. As we noted in a previous post, 68% of employers still use an outdated siloed benefit approach, with separate systems and processes, and separate websites utilizing separate passwords.9 (According to a TASC survey, 50% of companies use three or more separate platforms to administer their benefits.10) Too often, the experience of signing up for and utilizing benefits siloed in this way is so difficult, frustrating and time-consuming that employees simply don’t utilize them. Not only are employees not getting the satisfaction of the benefit you’re offering—in some cases it can sour them on your entire benefits program.
It comes down to this: Benefits that are too hard to access aren’t really benefits.
A single platform means benefits act like benefits
How you offer benefits matters. For most employees today, and particularly Millennials, who are tech savvy and expect a seamless digital user experience, the expectation is one platform with one portal, one password, and a user experience that’s the same across all devices. A single-platform, all-in-one benefit solution like we offer at TASC helps you meet those expectations. In addition to achieving better employee satisfaction, companies that convert to TASC Universal Benefit Account® also gain efficiencies in administrative time and expense and acquire the ability to introduce new benefits in as little as one day (instead of the months it can take with siloed benefits). If you want to offer a benefit that will give you a hiring advantage, you can do so in time to leverage it in next week’s new-hire interviews. And you aren’t limited in the number or types of benefits you offer. Universal Benefit Account includes 50 different potential benefits. And it’s still growing.
Make benefits easier for your employees and you’ll make engagement, retention and recruitment easier for your company. Ask us about TASC Universal Benefit Account.
Sources:
- “Talent 2020: Surveying the Talent Paradox from the Employee Perspective,” Deloitte University Press: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/mx/Documents/about-deloitte/Talent2020_Employee-Perspective.pdf
- “Want a More Productive Workforce? Invest in These 3 Things,” Inc.: https://www.inc.com/elizabeth-dukes/want-a-more-productive-workforce-invest-in-these-3-things.html
- “The talent challenge: Rebalancing skills for the digital age,” pwc, 2018: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ceo-survey/2018/deep-dives/pwc-ceo-survey-talent.pdf
- “Employee Engagement on the Rise in the US,” Gallup, August 2018: https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx
- “The talent challenge: Rebalancing skills for the digital age,” pwc, 2018: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ceo-survey/2018/deep-dives/pwc-ceo-survey-talent.pdf
- “Hays survey shows skills shortage will challenge US employers….,” Hays, January 2018: http://www.hays.com/press-releases/hays-survey-shows-skills-shortage-will-challenge-us-employers%E2%80%99-ambitious-growth-plans-2104620
- “30 percent salary bump? No, I’ll take the benefits,” Benefits Pro, November 2018: https://www.benefitspro.com/2018/11/29/30-percent-salary-bump-no-ill-take-the-benefits/
- “Strategize with Benefits,” SHRM, December 2017: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/pages/strategize-with-benefits.aspx
- Guardian Workplace Benefits Study - 5th Annual, May 2018
- TASC survey of 36 companies, 2019
