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Employers evaluating the benefits landscape to determine what employees want may find greater success by doing more with less.
Plan sponsors are tasked with providing comprehensive and increasingly complex benefits to employees, yet selecting and evaluating which benefits employees want—beyond a retirement plan—is complicated. Surveying and listening to employees and inspecting the roster of benefits offered is critical, said Monica De Agostino, the human resources manager at MRIGlobal, a nonprofit scientific research institute in Kansas City, Missouri, during a panel discussion at the PLANSPONSOR National Conference this week in Orlando, Florida.
The Great Resignation of 2021 posed a significant challenge for MRIGlobal, De Agostino says. At the height of the trend, “we had lots of market movement happening, lots of new hires, people leaving as well, [and] our demographics were changing,” De Agostino said. “How do we figure out what our current employee demographics want, and what do they want to motivate them?”
Responding to the trend affecting employee demographics, MRIGlobal surveyed the workforce, asking workers to rank benefits from most to least important, then developed data points illustrating which benefits are most important and what changes to benefits workers want to see, De Agostino explained.
“When it comes to benefits, we have to really maximize the value of these benefits and figure out, really, what people want” from their employer, she said.
Plan sponsors must carefully review their benefits to confirm that the benefits provided and the number of offerings as well as going to the source by surveying employees to evaluate benefits, said Brea Dantin, co-founder of and retirement plan adviser at Carmel, Indiana-based ProCourse Fiduciary Advisors LLC.
Employers “now not only have to offer certain benefits as table stakes, just to get employees to sign up to be our newest, greatest team member, but we’ve gone from maybe five to 10 benefits to upwards, in some organizations, of 30 to 40 benefits,” she said. “We’re talking about everything from a retirement plan all the way out to—a big topic right now—debt solutions [and] expanding our definition of time off to include sabbaticals and parental leave, instead of maternity leave.”
Employers evaluating their benefits’ spend and what employees want must alter their thinking that more is better, Dantin said.
“We’re in a ‘more is more’ [mode], but we need to be in a ‘less is more’ mode,” she said. “While we’re in a ‘more is more’ [mode], we’re actually depleting or diluting the benefit of some of our overarching benefit programs, which I never thought I would say, because, as an only child, I always want more. But as an employer, I want to make sure my employees—and as an adviser, our clients, the employees—are really valuing the benefit, and I don’t know that they can win [with] that quantity.”
Dealing with dozens of benefits is also complicated and confusing for employees, Dantin added.
“If you’re trying as a consumer, as the employee, to sift through the 30 to 40 benefits that have 30 to 40 vendors that have 30 to 40 benefits with different vendors and websites/apps, ain’t nobody got time for that, right?” Dantin asked. “Because when we leave work— in my household, I’m feeding three dogs when I walk in the door, [because] they want it now— I’m not sitting down and going, ‘How, as a consumer, do I optimize my dollar or my benefits spend?’”