Five voluntary trends you need to watch this year

Sales of voluntary products across the board will likely see a nice bump in 2015, as employers finalize their health care decisions and the War on Talent begins to heat back up.

“Employers have had time to recover from the recession, and they’ve analyzed how the [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] is going to impact them, so now they’re more willing to look at their overall benefit package,” says Bonnie Brazzell, vice president of Eastbridge Consulting Group Inc. in Avon, Connecticut.

Indeed, according to a recent Eastbridge survey, 14 percent of respondents said they were thinking about adding a new voluntary benefit. Moreover, 17 percent said they were thinking about moving some existing benefits to voluntary, and 12 percent said they were thinking of adding new partially employer-funded benefits.