The Top 2 Ways to Make Your Benefits Package Stand Out in the Labor Market

CoAdvantage- From the employer’s perspective, a benefits package has a job to do: if you spend the time, energy, and money to put together a competitive benefits package, it should benefit not just your workers but also the organization itself. It should enable your company to more successfully entice new employees, promote loyalty and retention among existing ones, and perhaps even make your workforce more productive overall.

But ensuring success with your benefits program relies on two foundational pillars.

1: Offer the right benefits.

Obviously, it’s fundamental to offer the right benefits package in the first place.

According to the MetLife 2020 Benefit Trends Survey, employees have clear preferences when it comes to benefit offerings. Health insurance ranks at the top of the list, with 86% of employees citing it as a must-have benefit. Only 3% say it’s not needed. Small-to-midsize employers who think they need to opt-out of health insurance offerings due to cost might consider joining a Large Group Health Plan through an organization like a Professional Employer Organization. 

But from there, employers need to do more to make their benefits package understandable.

2: Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Research shows that most employees – as many as 80% – simply do not understand or even read benefit materials. Around a third of employees specifically don’t understand their healthcare coverage; given health insurance is one of the most central benefit offerings, as described above, that’s potentially a big issue. Indeed, if they don’t understand how a given benefit works, it creates two problems:

1. First, they won’t know how to take advantage of it. The result will be frustration and a suboptimal experience that erodes the benefits of the benefit.

2. Second, the employers will lose an opportunity to impress the value of their benefits package on employees. And if you don’t communicate the true value of your benefits to prospective hires, you could lose good workers to companies that do a better job of touting their benefits.

CoAdvantage, one of the nation’s largest Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs), helps small to mid-sized companies with HR administration, benefits, payroll, and compliance. To learn more about CoAdvantage’s ability to create a strategic HR function in your business that drives business growth potential, contact us today.