Improve your employee benefits: A Q&A with Barry Fitzpatrick

In today’s competitive job market, employers are on a constant pursuit to attract top talent who can support their clients and drive their organization’s success. Offering compelling employee benefits has become crucial in both attracting and retaining valuable staff.

So says Barry Fitzpatrick, VP of Client Services, Employee benefits with Holmes Murphy. He can provide insights on how employers can enhance their employee benefits offerings through key strategies.

How can employers transform their current employee benefits plan into a more tailored one?

Employers can positively transform employee benefits by individualizing their offerings, improving affordability, and informing their employees. Offering individualized benefits creates an environment that’s positioned to support the unique experiences and needs of your employees.

To improve affordability, employers will need a nuanced and thoughtful strategy with long-term incremental steps. Lastly, communication is a key competency of any successful employer when it comes to managing their employee benefits program. To transform a typical employee benefits plan into a robust strategy, employers should understand and address the needs of their membership.

To guarantee benefits for all, why should employers offer individualized benefits?

Employers should offer individualized benefits because they produce an environment that shows support for the exclusive experiences and needs of their employees. For instance, having multiple health plan designs, regional network options, coverage tiers, and voluntary insurance options are all examples of individualized benefits. To understand which benefits currently resonate with employees and identify opportunities to boost those benefits, or add new ones, start by talking with your employees.

What are some steps organizations could take to improve health insurance affordability for their employees?

Ways that organizations could improve health insurance affordability are by tackling more affordability refinement and producing a planned-out strategy with long-term incremental steps. For instance, reviewing medical contracts by examining administrative fees, pharmacy revenue, network access fees, ad hoc charges, and all shared savings fees could improve health insurance affordability.

Related: What’s going on with open enrollment?

How can benchmarking help employers negotiate better fees, premiums, and plan designs with their insurance carriers?

With benchmarking, an employer can review their offering in relation to peers. A contract review allows employers to input from larger data sets about their program design, helping them begin to negotiate fees, premiums, and leverage their plan design changes. Beyond plan design, a contract review can help align with modern and clarified definitions of key pricing components, definitions, and coverage provisions to create further opportunities for savings.

What are ways to create impactful communication to develop a robust employee benefits plan?

Impactful conversations happen from understanding how and when employees want to receive information, which requires requesting direct feedback from employees on what works for them. Leverage technology to monitor which approaches offer the most employee engagement, like email click-through and open rates. Relying on a single communication method does not deliver the best results – employers should utilize both traditional and innovative approaches to get their message across.