How to Drive Engagement with Benefits

If you’re seeing that your workforce is more focused on lunch than achieving business results, that’s a problem. Many recent studies confirm what we already know: Employee engagement is strongly connected to productivity, profitability and customer satisfaction. An AON Trends Report indicates that companies with high levels of employee engagement see a 19% increase in production, while companies with low engagement levels see a 33% decrease in operating income.

Obviously, increased employee engagement is good for productivity, but Gallup’s latest meta-analysis takes things a step further, showing that business units in the top one-fourth of employee engagement are 21% more profitable, 17% more productive, have 10% better customer ratings, experience 41% less absenteeism, and suffer 70% fewer safety incidents compared with business units in the bottom fourth.

So, what motivates engagement? Employee turnover is extraordinarily expensive, so it’s important to take whatever actions possible to mitigate it.

Everyone wants to be appreciated and acknowledged for a job well done, and your people want to feel connected to your company, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Determining what motivates employees to stay is key: Is it a better compensation package? Additional training and development opportunities? A flexible work environment? Yes, those offerings definitely can help make up what keeps employees motivated, but a solid benefits program can also be a huge influence on your employees’ overall engagement.

Paycor simplifies benefits management.

Providing a great benefits plan is a significant part of your engagement strategy. But, benefits enrollment and administration is becoming increasingly complex with the rapid pace of change in the benefits world. And, benefits plans can be extraordinarily complicated, not only for your HR staff, but especially for your employees. Remember, your goal is to keep your teams engaged, not make their work lives more difficult! You can easily mitigate the difficulty of administering benefits by working with a provider who’s “been there, done that,” and has a plan.

First of all, it’s important to find ways to simplify everyone’s day-to-day processes and minimize time-consuming, manual tasks. Removing paper and taking benefits enrollment and administration online is the primary step. When you streamline the entire HR, benefits and payroll process so that it’s as efficient and painless as possible, everyone wins.

Second, empowering your employees and managers to maintain their personal and team information from anywhere with an internet connection is an additional way to improve engagement. Self-service options have been proven over and over again to help improve employee satisfaction across the board.

Third, offering interactive shopping and decision support tools can help educate your people on their benefits options, and they can even get recommendations based on their individual needs. Having a benefits enrollment tool that’s designed more like an online shopping experience is made easier with decision support tools and a user-friendly, familiar interface. Taking the guesswork out of benefit decisions and providing a personalized plan comparison can help your employees feel more in control, and also removes an enormous administrative burden from your benefits team.

Helping our clients get the most out of our service and keeping them ahead of the curve is key to their success and ours. Let’s talk about how we can improve your company’s employee engagement today.