Benefits packages need to deliver, not just stand out

Offering holistic benefit packages that go beyond competitors is a great way to recruit, but retaining people requires ensuring that employees actually engage with their benefits.

Offering better, more creative and comprehensive benefit packages is a no-brainer. Employers now offer pet insurance to help cover more of their employees’ extended lives. There are entire companies, like Blunovus whose main mission is on improving workplace wellbeing, that are thriving precisely because they help organizations care for their employees more holistically. There are a lot of ways to think about expanding your benefit offerings, however when prioritizing where to focus it can be helpful to consider available survey data — which we get into below.

One specific approach that many companies are taking to bolster their benefits packages and recruit top talent is offering more financial wellness resources. When you think about employee benefits, so many of the most-valued benefits are ultimately about supporting employees’ financial security. A recent Morgan Stanley survey found that 90% of employees want their company to prioritize financial benefits and 95% of HR executives plan to do so.

There are tons of ways that companies help their employees to create wealth and protect their financial security: retirement savings plans, health insurance, voluntary life and disability insurance, and more. Estate planning is an often overlooked service that can be part of this mix of benefits that are focused on protecting and supporting employees’ finances – by helping them protect their financial legacies.

A recent study, “The State of Estate Planning,” revealed that only 13% of workers get estate planning as a benefit now. Yet of the remaining 87%, more than 72% would be interested in using estate planning services if they were offered by their employer.

Offering benefits that people want but aren’t commonly offered is a great way to make your benefits package stand out. Using estate planning as an example; you can not only provide a benefit most of your competitors aren’t, but also help provide access to people who typically face more barriers to financial services. This recent piece in The Atlantic highlights how non-traditional families are commonly disadvantaged when trying to build generational wealth. Your DE&I efforts should go beyond hiring and include helping bridge accessibility gaps through tangible financial wellness benefits.

Another big advantage to expanding financial wellness benefits is helping increase employee satisfaction and productivity. This recent survey from PWC goes deeper into how significant the impact of personal finance issues are on productivity. Ask yourself this, if your employees were given the peace of mind that comes from knowing that their loved ones would be taken care of in the event of their passing, how much more productive might they be? The key point here is that if you focus your benefits on alleviating stresses and worries the more likely your employees will be to stay with your organization and feel gratified in their work knowing you care about their wellbeing.

Expanding your benefit offerings so that you stand out is not easy or simple, but there are a few guiding principles you should consider. You’ll find success the more holistically your benefit packages address people’s lives and finances, particularly if you’re offering things your competitors don’t.

What is less straightforward, however, is getting people to actually engage with their benefits often enough to realize the full value of what’s being offered. You can offer people the best benefits in the world but it only matters if they actually use them. Don’t lose people because they never actually realize the value of your benefits.

The first aspect of this is onboarding and education. Go beyond the boilerplate pitch of each benefit, provide usable guides, and regularly hold interactive workshops that provide an immediate valuable outcome at the end. People are busy and rarely want to sit through benefit explanation PowerPoint readouts, especially if the benefit doesn’t become tangible in the near-term — e.g., retirement accounts for younger people. Focus part of your onboarding and benefits education on demonstrating the more immediate impact of engagement with their benefits.

A second crucial aspect of increasing the value of employee benefits through more consistent engagement is providing benefits that are designed not to be set-it-and-forget-it. Drawing again from the estate planning example above we’re talking about something that people typically expect only to be relevant for end-of-life, when in reality having a consistently updated estate plan that reflects current life circumstances is a crucial part of personal financial management.

Illuminating for your employees things that they can and should be doing to better manage their finances and then actually enabling them to do so via partnerships they don’t get elsewhere, in addition to education — is a fantastic approach to ensure consistent engagement with a tangible benefit.

The bottom line is that your benefit offerings need to be set up in a way that employees realize the value of their benefits in an ongoing way, in addition to differentiating you from competitors on paper.

Rafael Loureiro is the CEO of Wealth, the company that is demystifing estate planning with modern tools to create, manage and visualize your estate to ensure your family’s financial future.