Proactive or Reactive: What’s Your Benefit Strategy?

Understanding the needs of employees is important in order to provide the right benefit plans and options. Sometimes you can’t fulfill all employees’ financial expectations, but offering a quality, cost-effective plan is a good starting point for gaining employee buy-in. A proactive approach to benefits ensures a higher concentration of employees enrolled in your benefits programs.

Associated Financial Group devotes a single survey to one of the most crucial challenges you face: Identifying a benefits package that is affordable for your organization and valuable to your employees. Experience has shown us that tabling attitude questions related to employee benefits greatly improves the survey's focus and thus the reliability of the results.

What are some crucial, cost-saving strategies that an employee benefits survey can help you identify?

• Reducing health insurance costs. You could accomplish this by reducing benefits or by passing on more premiums to employees-but which is the right strategy? A dedicated employee benefits survey will tell you whether your employees value lower premiums or a richer benefit plan. You should not move forward with either tactic without this knowledge!
• Retaining valuable employees with the benefits they desire. Suppose you are considering a new benefit such as an Identity Theft product, for example, but none of your employees are interested in the benefit. This knowledge would save your organization time and money-and improve your benefits package as you spend the dollars on something the employees will value.