A Guide To Employee Benefits Benchmarking

Employee benefits benchmarking is a crucial part of attracting and retaining top talent. In today’s competitive talent market, knowing exactly how your organization’s benefits measure up can give you an edge. This practice is not only used to make your benefit offerings appealing to current and potential employees, but also to compare your plans to competitors in the market. By evaluating your benefits plans, you can understand performance gaps, identify areas of improvement, and evaluate other product offerings in the market.

Where to Get Started:

Your employee benefits broker should be providing you with benchmarking data on an annual basis at a minimum. With this data, you receive access to key metrics including public and proprietary information, trends in plan designs, coverage types, and more. From there, your employee benefits consultant will help build a benefits benchmarking report with accurate and specific information pertaining to the particular role or plan you are trying to build.

The Benefits of Benchmarking

Once this information is obtained, there are a number of ways it becomes useful to your organization:

1. Cost-Saving: With accurate data, it becomes easier to identify areas of over-spending (or under-spending) in your current offer. When comparing to other organizations, consider evaluating things such as high and low deductibles for health insurance, life insurance policies paid by the organization, and browsing other employer paid benefits you may or may not be offering. This evaluation will maximize your spending on employee benefits while dialing back unnecessary costs to your organization.
2. Stay Ahead of Competition: The most valuable use of benefits benchmarking is to stay competitive with what other organizations are offering. From year-to-year, trends in every type of insurance including health, vision, dental, and life are changing. Additionally, priorities for employees constantly evolve and with them your benefits should, too. By obtaining these metrics and ensuring they measure up to competition is key to maintaining a relevant and attractive benefits plan to employees.
3. Measuring Return on Investment: Gauging what is most important to employees is vital to ensuring that your employee benefits spend is going to the benefits that your employees deem priority. Reinvesting in new areas and removing unnecessary expenditures can help to increase return on the investment in your employees and their benefits by focusing on what they value most coupled with what competitors are offering.

Ready to begin your benchmarking analysis? Get in touch with Exude’s experts for a complimentary assessment today! Fill out the form below and begin refining your benefits plans!