During the COVID-19 economic crisis, revising your company’s benefits strategy may appear to be a complicated process. However, we here at benefEx have you covered!
Evolving Your Benefits Strategy With an Evolving Financial Outlook
Here are some of the steps we recommend you take with your benefits consultant to navigate the process.
Identify the Company’s Objectives, Including Budget
Setting objectives for what you want to accomplish with your company’s benefits strategy will provide overall guidance. Bear in mind for this step that you are not aiming for specific benefits to offer. Instead, you’ll want to focus on identifying the needs of both the company and the employees. Your consultant will ask you a series of questions that will help to identify your particular needs.
Complete a Data-Driven Needs Assessment
Determining what the needs and desires of your current employees are can be accomplished by conducting a utilization review with data from your insurance provider. In addition to quantifying this information, surveying employees can often be helpful to qualify the information you find most important to your process. Your benefits consultant can help design a custom survey that meets your goals and objectives.
Your benefits consultant can also help you stay abreast of how laws should guide your benefits strategies moving forward–for example, if your staff size has changed due to COVID-19, or if perhaps your headquarters have moved to another state there may be additional areas of consideration when developing your new benefits strategy.
Formulate a Program
To determine whether to add or eliminate benefit offerings, or to simply change some of them, it is often helpful to assess each benefit by answering the following questions:
- Can changes to the existing offerings create cost savings?
- Is there any risk to the company if benefits that are not valued by employees are cut?
- What is the proper strategy to require or increase employee contributions with minimal impact on employee morale?
Communicate Well When Explaining Benefits to Employees
Having open conversations with employees about benefits can help build confidence in management and loyalty to the company. This is particularly true after coworkers have lost jobs, and the financial landscape strategy is changing. If you want employee buy-in, it is critical to ensure their understanding. Use various communications strategies to appeal to the varied learning styles of your staff. These can include annual in-person benefits meetings conducted by your benefits consultant who will review benefits and answer any questions employees have. This can also include an on-line employee portal that contains all of the information about the benefits employees are eligible for including employee contributions, plan summaries and links to find in-network physicians.
Think of Benefits as Flexible Moving Forward
Being open-minded about new opportunities in benefits can help ease company staffing transitions and keep remaining staff feeling cared for by their employer. Thinking of benefits as something that can be flexible moving forward may be a new way of finding security as your business grows.
We Will Help You Revise Your Benefits Strategy
Our team is here to assist you—no matter what. Contact benefEx to discuss revising your benefits strategy during this evolving financial landscape. We wish you safety and wellness during these challenging times, and we’re ready to help when you need us.