How To Close The Gap Between HR Perception & Employee Perception of Employee Benefits Offerings

Benefits PRO recommends 4 simple strategies for making sure that employees are seeing the same value in the available employee benefits package components that the company’s human resources professionals are seeing. 

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The first recommendation is to simply ask employees what they think about their benefits, what the pain points are, and what can be improved? This tactic is not to be confused with collecting information, which, while also important, is not the same thing as one person asking another person questions directly - face-to-face. While surveys and other means of generating useful data are a great place to start, the real key is to build from those responses and initiate deeper conversations that better probe the underlying issues and aspirations more precisely than even the most perfectly crafted survey prompts can. The goal is to generate new ideas and new understandings, which tends to be much more readily achievable through open discourse and brainstorming as opposed to interpreting patterns derived from multiple choice questionnaires. 

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The second recommendation offered by the authors is to listen to the answers that their employees are providing. Too often, whether information is obtained through a survey or through a in-person conversation, the employee responses are logged, the notes are summarized, averages and/or summaries are compiled, and the work is considered done. In reality, asking is the easy part, but actually hearing the concerns and opinions expressed by employees anew in a way that enables you to internalize how those challenges have evolved since your last check in and in what ways any efforts taken to address those kinds of problems in the past have fallen short or succeeded. 

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Further, it’s important to listen not only to the information that is being conveyed, but also the emotion and intensity behind that information. It can sometimes be easy to get lost down a rabbit hole when trying to get to the bottom of some employee’s benefits-related grievance, only to discover that particular issue may in fact be a very minor concern even to the employee who raised the issue. Perhaps they were simply blowing off steam or maybe they just didn’t want to leave a blank space in their survey responses, so they came up with something on the spot, which is why it’s always a good ideas to get a solid read on how adamantly an employee or group of employees feel about the seriousness of a problem before investing in serious efforts to resolve it. 

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The third tactic recommended in the article is to then act upon what you have heard coming from your employees after asking and listening. Just as it does no good to collect information if that information isn’t then processed, analyzed, and understood, it similarly wouldn’t do much good to internalize all that information in a meaningful way without then putting that new understanding into practice. Very few problems ever have perfect solutions and it’s important not to overlook potential imperfect avenues toward improvement. Use the information you’ve painstakingly gathered and thought through in order to develop hypotheses, and then put those hypotheses to the test. The surest way to guarantee that the concerns highlighted by your employees go unaddressed is to do nothing at all, whereas even a step in the wrong direction can build some momentum that can ultimately lead to positive change and will give employees confidence that their voices are being heard, which in turn will encourage employees to continue proactively providing feedback to help continuously shape the process until those next steps start heading in the right direction.

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The author's final recommendation may be the simplest of all - repeat the previous three steps. Too often, employers look at these kinds of feedback initiatives as singular, one-off events that have a start and a finish, after which point they are put to bed. In reality, for this kind of system to be effective, it needs to be a feedback loop that remains ongoing and continues self-correcting through each new cycle. If this process is commenced/completed every six months, your company will be ahead of the curve when it comes to optimizing employee insights and crafting the best possible employee benefits package to everyone’s mutual benefit.

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