Why old-school benefits aren't enough

Remember when all you expected to do with your phone was make calls? Now, you expect your smartphone to give you driving directions, recommend nearby restaurants, track your favorite politician’s tweets, and take great selfies to boot.

Likewise, expectations for employee benefits have changed — especially for millennials and Gen Zers. Standard benefits, like medical and dental insurance and paid vacation, only scratch the surface of what younger employees care about today. Now, employers need to offer the same types of perks we’ve all come to expect from our smartphones: convenience, choice, connection and more.

That means flip-phone era benefits won’t cut it if your clients want to recruit and retain top millennial and Gen Z talent. To attract the best of these generations, employers must upgrade employee benefits for the smartphone generation.

Convenience and immediacy

Over the past two decades, exponential technological advancement has radically changed every facet of how we work and play. We live in a world where you can binge-watch any show you want while ordering groceries and simultaneously tweeting about both. Millennials and Gen Zers expect benefits that conform to their lifestyle—quick, easy, painless.

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In years past, it was sufficient to offer the standard benefits package and delivery mechanism, which entailed scheduling appointments and driving somewhere to access benefits. No more! Who wants to drive 20 minutes to a doctor’s office and sit for hours in a crowded room of sneezing people when you can video chat with a Teladoc physician and have your prescription filled with same-day delivery from your pharmacy in minutes? Or schedule an appointment to head to a musty office to go over binders of information with a career coach when you can just fire up your laptop, upload your resume for review, and video chat with a career coach on the spot—all in your pajamas?

In a multiscreen, smartphone-dominated world, old-school benefits need to come with a new-tech twist; both with the availability of benefits that fit the millennial lifestyle as well as the ability to manage everything online.

Choice and personalization

There is no shortage of options today in any area of our lives. Whether it’s a show, a shoe, or a shared software solution, there’s a veritable catalog of possibilities all waiting to be evaluated and dismissed or selected.

This means organizations need to offer options too. Millennials and Gen Zers must be able to select from a suite of benefits to best suit their specific situation and lifestyle. Of course, the desire to pick and choose isn’t limited just to the younger generations. According to the CareerArc Future of Recruiting Study, 71 percent of all job seekers rank workplace flexibility as the top benefit that would most attract or retain them as employees, followed by health and wellness perks (58 percent) and professional development/course fee reimbursements (48 percent). Companies should offer benefits to promote flexibility, including the freedom to work remotely, unlimited paid time off, or flex hours.

Connection and purpose

Millennials and Gen Zers are known to be drawn to causes with social impact. They also often have a natural curiosity and quest for knowledge, craving rich learning experiences and the ability to grow and evolve while contributing to a higher purpose. According to a survey conducted by TODAY and fitness company Greatist, 75 percent of millennials believe that finding a sense of purpose in their work is more important than salary. And 60 percent of millennials believe social responsibility plays a significant role in choosing where they want to work. Continued education, training, mentorship, and advancement opportunities, as well as social impact programs and volunteering (or time off to participate in these activities), are benefits that resonate with this group.

Stability and well-being

Millennials and Gen Zers are no strangers to economic woes; the impact of the Great Recession still stings. Millennials in particular got off to a rough start and are worse off than earlier generations in terms of their career advancement and financials. According to a Bank of America survey, more than three-quarters of millennials carry debt, with 16 percent of those owing $50,000 or more, not including mortgage debt. In addition, education costs have skyrocketed in recent years, meaning millennials and Gen Zers are graduating college with high student loan debt that weigh them down.

To appeal to millennials and Gen Zers, organizations can focus on benefits like student loan repayment assistance. Outplacement benefits — career transition programs given to employees who are laid off or terminated — are also appreciated as a security measure to help find work should employment end. An impressive 71 percent of job seekers are likely to choose a company that offers outplacement over a company that does not, if all else was equal, according to the CareerArc Workplace Flexibility Study. In addition, retirement plans, especially matching plans or plans that use technology to help maximize return outcomes, are also popular among younger generations.

While news headlines that claim to define the millennial and Gen Zers abound, the truth is that these groups defy unifying explanations. Gen Z is the most diverse generation in American history, whose members “also possess untraditional views about identity,” according to The New York Times. This means forward-thinking employers must embrace employees’ diversity of needs and wants, providing benefits that offer the personalized convenience of the smartphone age.

Yair Riemer is President of Career Transition Services at CareerArc.