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Key Takeaways
ARTICLE | Do Your Employee Benefits Make The Grade?
We are excited to announce the launch of Insights+, a service that enables employers to see exactly how their benefits measure up against the competition.
AND as a special incentive for newsletter subscribers and early adopters, we are offering this new service at no cost for qualifying who apply through the remainder of 2024.
Click here to see if you qualify for the free Insights+ early adopter opportunity!
All we need from you is the employee benefits guide that you provide to employees. That’s it. If you don’t have an employee benefits guide, just fill out a short questionnaire.
From there, we analyze the information you provide (which will remain confidential at all times, of course) across a variety of dimensions (e.g. health, financial, tangential, leave) and then provide a detailed, 25+ page report summarizing how your benefit offerings stack up against various cohorts of similarly sized and situated competitor organizations compiled from our database of more than 20 thousand employers.
We also provide badges and ready-for-distribution, customized informational materials that can be shared with recruits and employees in order to convey the value of the benefits your organization offers, which the average employee currently underestimates by more than 50%. That amounts to an average of about $12,000 in benefit value per employee per year that employers are providing but that employees are not perceiving.
Click here for a free 15 minute consultation to find out if your organization qualifies for the free Insights+ report available through December 31, 2024.
With an independent evaluation of their benefits offerings from a non-biased third-party, employers can better benchmark their offerings relative to other similar employers that are competing to attract similar talent.
Employers can also then better adjust those offerings to more finely target the ideal workforce segment, and better convey the value of those benefits in a way that gives both current employees and job applicants a consistent, objective, and independent means to compare benefits on equal footing across different companies.
As we have noted many times on these pages, offering great employee benefits can be a significant advantage for employers on a number of different fronts - including improved productivity, operational continuity, and mission/incentive alignment for example - but employee attraction and retention may be the most widely-cited sources of return on investment for employers when it comes to recouping benefit expenses.
Benefits only serve to help retain current talent if the talent has a practical understanding of the value those benefits provide, however, and employers are often even less effective in realizing the recruiting advantages that offering exceptional employee benefits can provide.
As a part of the 2024 Mployer Insights survey, we collected data from employees at more than 20,000 companies to illuminate the disconnect in benefits information/communication between employers and prospective employees, and we found that this disconnect is massively disadvantageous to employers who offer market competitive benefits or better but don’t fully capture the value of those benefits when attracting and competing for the best available talent.
According to our survey, the top two factors that are most influential to both current and prospective employees when evaluating jobs are compensation and benefits, cited as top concerns by 79% and & 76% of respondents, respectively, which far outweigh other leading influential factors such as organizational culture (54%) and getting along with management (59%) and leadership (51%).
In fact, the opportunity to obtain better benefits alone can potentially motivate employees to seek out new employment, with nearly 3 out of 4 respondents claiming that they’d change jobs in order to obtain a more flexible work schedule such as hybrid and/or remote work options. About half of all respondents would accept a new job if the prospective employer offered better 401k terms and offered health insurance that covered more employee medical costs, as well.
In order to intentionally pursue opportunities with better benefits, however, employees need to have both an accurate understanding of the value of the benefits offered by their current employer as well as an accurate understanding of the value of benefits offered by potential prospective employers, in addition to an objective means to compare and evaluate those benefits options across companies - all of which relies on getting information that is often difficult if not impossible to obtain.
Despite increasingly recognizing the potential value of benefits in general, employees often don’t have a particularly detailed grasp of the benefits offered at their current place of employment. For example, about 1 in 5 survey respondents think their employers cover between 0% and 20% of their healthcare costs, while another 1 in 5 respondents estimate that their employers cover between 60% and 80% of employee healthcare costs, which is a fairly wide spread.
It can be even more challenging to get detailed, actionable, and objective information from prospective employers that can facilitate benefit package comparison across multiple organizations during the job search and pre-employment stages of recruiting.
Among survey respondents, fewer than 1 in 5 (19%) claimed that they had an easy way to compare the value of benefits among different employers during their last job search, while nearly half of respondents (47%) claimed they did not have an easy way to make such comparisons.
With 88% of job seekers looking for information about benefits as a part of the job search, and with only 22% of companies providing that information to candidates during recruitment, there is a considerable opportunity for employers that offer average and better benefits packages to differentiate themselves from the competition by more clearly conveying the relative value of the benefits they are already offering.
The vast majority of employees support greater transparency in how and when benefits information is conveyed, with almost 9 out of 10 respondents favoring greater transparency from both prospective and current employers with regard to the benefits they offer as well as how those benefits compare to the benefits offered by competitors.
Similarly, about 9 out of 10 respondents also claimed they would be more likely to apply for a job at a prospective employer if that employer is more transparent upfront about the benefits they are offering.
In light of this consistent supermajority favoring benefits transparency, it is perhaps unsurprising that the number of respondents who are more likely to accept a job at a company that had received an award for providing great benefits is once again 9 out of 10.
Bridging these gaps is where Insights + provides such a benefit to employees and recruits beyond simply helping employers better understand and capture the value that their benefits expenses should be generating.
We are extremely excited about the opportunity the new Insights+ service has to positively impact both employers as well as current and prospective employees - especially those who prioritize quality benefit offerings.
Employers that already offer quality benefits packages may be the most direct beneficiaries of the program, which will better enable them to promote the work that they have already put in to keep their organization ahead of the curve.
It’s worth making a point to note, however, that the data that serves as the basis for these reports may be equally if not more valuable to employers who haven’t yet been prioritizing the competitiveness of their employee benefits offerings.
For those employers whose benefits are below average relative to their competitors, the program and accompanying analysis offer an opportunity to pinpoint not only the areas in which current benefits fall short, but the report will also indicate the percentile margin by which the offerings are subpar for the job/industry/region. Even for organizations that aren’t interested in improving benefits offerings, quantifying and benchmarking benefits in this way can be helpful to identify and more cost-effectively target the subset of the labor pool whose expectations are in line with your offerings.
Regardless of the degree to which one currently prioritizes benefit quality, we believe this program represents a significant step toward increased transparency, objectivity, and information access that will serve employers and employees alike, resulting in faster hiring and longer retention at lower net costs to everyone's mutual benefit.
If you’re interested in seeing how your plan compares, click here to access your free Insights+ report for qualifying employers through the end of 2024 - otherwise, keep an eye out in future newsletter installments and on the Mployer blog for more information about the program coming soon!
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