Open Enrollment Prep: Survey Your Staff to Fine-Tune Your Benefits

As the year-end open enrollment period approaches, now is the time to fine-tune your benefits, and that starts with surveying your employees about their views of your current offerings.

There should be more to this effort than checking boxes. It’s important that you elicit an honest assessment from your employees, and once you have their responses you need to process and analyze them with the goal of exploring changes that will benefit your staff.

Surveys are not exercises in futility. A recent study by Aflac found that while four out of five employers think their workers are satisfied with their benefits, only three in five employees say the same. That disconnect can result in employers offering benefits year after year that their staff may not value.

Offering the wrong benefits can be costly, considering that benefits account for between 30% and 40% of total compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a lot to spend on something you don’t know is generating a solid return on investment.

Employee survey components

Structure your surveys so that you can identify:

• Which benefits employees value most,
• Where current offerings are inadequate, and
• Emerging needs or preferences (e.g., mental health, flexible work, student loan assistance)

Areas you may want to cover in your survey include:

• General satisfaction with benefits and whether there are any they want but you don’t offer.
• Health care coverage affordability, coverage depth and network satisfaction.
• Participation in wellness programs, satisfaction with mental health support and learning opportunities.
• Overall impressions, understanding and usefulness of current benefits.

You may want to dig deeper into views on your most important benefit, group health insurance, by asking questions like:

• How well does the current plan cover your needs?
• Do you feel the current plan’s deductibles and copayments are fair?
• Do you believe the current plan offers good value for the cost?
• How easy is it for you to find in-network providers for the health care you need? 
• Are there any specific types of specialists or facilities you wish were more accessible in our network?
• How easy is it to understand your benefits and how to use them?
• How can we better communicate information about the health plan?
• How satisfied are you with the customer support related to the health plan?

Digging deep

The next step is picking through the answers to identify trends and opportunities. As your health insurance broker, we can help digest the information and develop a plan for you. We can also segment the findings by age, family status (kids or no kids) or job function to better personalize offerings that match your employees’ needs.

Once we do that, you can prioritize which potential actions make the most sense, are feasible and would make the largest impact. We can then make a plan that includes:

• Short-term changes: Low-cost, high-impact adjustments
• Mid-term changes: Plan design or contribution changes
• Long-term initiatives: Introducing a new benefit category

Final thoughts

Even small improvements show employees that their voice matters.

Just remember that many people have short attention spans, so ensure the surveys don’t take longer than five or 10 minutes to complete.

Also, arrange for the surveys to be submitted anonymously so your staff will feel free to speak their minds.

Whatever changes you decide to make must also be communicated to the employees, so they understand what’s coming and why the changes are being made. This shows that you took the survey seriously and responded with action.

Your transparency will build credibility, especially if changes take time.