What Is Your Benefits Strategy?

As an employer, the benefits you offer to employees are an important part of recruitment. Unfortunately, a lot of companies continue to use the same basic benefits package they have for decades. If you want to attract top talent, it’s important to take a good, hard look at your benefits strategy and find ways to update it, to stay competitive in today’s job market. Here are some ways to do that.

Offer Employees What They Want

Just about any company with a benefits strategy at all will offer health insurance, vacation time, and a retirement plan of some sort. If you want to stand out to prospective employees, you need to give them something they can’t get at another company. And more importantly, you need to give them things they really care about.

If a lot of your employees are at the stage in life where they’re thinking about starting families, offer a generous amount of paid maternity and paternity leave. If many of them are health conscious and concerned about getting in shape, offer fitness benefits: membership at a local gym (if your company doesn’t have one of its own), or even just a Fitbit to help them track physical activity. If you’re recruiting people right out of college, it can also help to offer debt management and consolidation services, to help them get out from under their student loans.

Then, once you’ve got some of these benefits in place, look to see how many people are taking advantage of them. Survey your employees to see what other benefits they’d be interested in. This way, you can evolve your benefits strategy to remain competitive and continue giving your workers the things that are important to them.

Engage Your Employees Effectively

What you offer to employees is only part of your benefits strategy. Just as important is how you communicate the details to them. A lot of companies hand out a pamphlet or brochure that provides an overview of benefits. Some hold an annual meeting or seminar to talk about it and go over any changes. These approaches tend to be impersonal and ultimately ineffective at communicating the information they need to know regarding benefits enrollment.

A much better strategy is to make benefits education digital and interactive. Give them the opportunity to explore different benefits on their own, from their smartphone, tablet, or other device. Paypro’s Benefit Solutions on the WorkforceOne® platform allows employees to easily compare benefits plans and costs all online from any internet connected device.  You can even take this a step further and enable a chat window that connects them with someone from HR to explain things and answer any questions they may have.

Some companies also choose to have a benefits fair close to enrollment time, to make sure employees have an opportunity to get all the important information they need. An event like this gives them an opportunity to talk to experts about different benefits, one on one, and ask questions. A virtual benefits fair can work as well, providing the same opportunities for education, without costing as much.

These are just a few of the things you can do to bring your company’s benefits package into the 21^st century. Today’s job market is very competitive, and if you want to recruit top talent, you need to stand out from the other companies that are trying to snap them up. Reevaluating your benefits strategy and updating it to be clearer and more competitive is one of the best ways you can do that.