Employee Benefits Consulting Services for Small Businesses
Employee benefits are important for any company that offers healthcare coverage. They include things like medical insurance, dental care, vision care, life insurance, disability insurance, retirement plans, and other benefits. These benefits are often offered by employers through an employee benefits consultant.
What is a benefits consultant?
Benefits consultants help companies source, manage, and select benefits for their workers. They are usually external providers who have expertise in this ever-changing area of employee rewards.
Why should you hire a consultant?
If you’re looking for ways to improve your company’s employee benefits, then hiring a consultant might be a good idea. They will help you understand what options are available to you and how to choose between them.
The HR & Rewards team has a heavy workload as it is, and benefits often fall to the wayside since they eat up a lot of internal resources. By working with an effective consultant, you can reclaim your time to focus on what matters most to you, your people.
How can they help?
As previously mentioned, these consultants are specialists in their field and can help organisations in a number of ways:
Designing the right package for your people
Brokering your benefits – ensuring you are paying the right price for the package
Communicating the pros and cons of each product to your audience. Often this is an area that is overlooked when it comes to reward packages.
Recruitment & Retention. The main reason organisations offer benefits packages is to help recruit top talent or to stop their current staff from walking out the door to their competitors. A top-performing benefits package will assist in making you look more attractive to potential new staff members as well as serving as an incentive to stay for those who are looking elsewhere.
Understand what benefits employees need.
The benefits you offer to your employees vary dramatically. Some help them with their jobs, and some act like safety nets. It’s important to understand the difference between what is classified as a core package, a lifestyle package, a wellbeing package, and a mixture of all the above.
Core includes things like healthcare, pensions, holidays, etc.
Lifestyle might be gym memberships, discount coupons, etc.
Wellbeing could be mental healthcare, financial education etc.
To design good rewards, you need to understand your workforce. We recommend deep dive conversations like focus groups and surveys to get to know your employees. It won't take long for you to find out what benefits your staff finds valuable, desirable, and those that they can do without. Have a discussion with your consultant to match up the data with rewards.
Create a plan for your company's future.
Many employers fail to design a benefits package that can grow with the business. With more success, you'll inevitably see a larger headcount with more diversity in your organization. Choosing the right benefits is vital in order that your benefits remain valuable during this period of growth. New gimmicks and fads are constantly appearing, but you should focus on delivering your "core offering" before you add bells and whistles.
Find out how much it costs.
As with many business things, it's all about the price. You can't understate the importance of setting aside adequate budget to offer a top-notch benefits package - it will help you attract top talent.
The first step HR and reward professionals take is getting buy-in from key stakeholders. A benefits consultant can help create a compelling business case for introducing benefits.
Gather your employee data in one place, and then ask for quotes from several providers before committing it to the finance department for the budget.
Determine whether or not your current plan meets your needs.
You should consider how much money you will need to pay out in benefits each year. This number will help you determine whether or not your current Benefits package is sufficient. If you're unsure, talk with a consultant who specializes in employee benefits. They'll be able to give you advice based on your company's size and industry.
We have recently developed a useful tool that takes 5 mins to assess your current package – give it a try here: Reward Healthcheck (lemonadereward.com)
Choose rewards that motivate employees.
It is also possible to use a reward package to motivate your staff and encourage their success within the workplace. There's a whole range of rewards you can offer, from giving cash bonuses and gift cards to more simplistic notes of appreciation from upper management (we encourage you to get creative with these and make them as personal as possible to the team/employee for whom they are intended). Adding this style of reward to employee benefits can make a big difference.
Set goals
An integral part of running a successful business is motivating your employees, and setting clearly defined goals is a sure way to keep them motivated. When the long term and short term goals are aligned with business needs, it can create a culture where everyone is rowing in the same direction. It may seem impossible to achieve long-term goals, but breaking those macro goals into smaller (micro) ones can serve as valuable stepping stones towards success.
Create a system for tracking results
Having clearly defined goals is only the first step - the next step is to establish a way of tracking your progress - after all, there is nothing worse than achieving a milestone and wondering why no one notices. You will be able to determine the effectiveness of your reward program by keeping a close eye on the performance of those involved, and if not, you will be able to make changes to the program to improve it.
Implement changes as needed.
In a world where employee benefits and rewards are constantly evolving, we have to make sure that we are able to keep up with the times. In the case of benefits packages, it is not uncommon for them to seem a bit outdated after 5 years of development, as new innovations are constantly appearing on the market, so reviewing what you have in place is one of the best ways to uncover exciting new possibilities. In addition, it is important to keep in mind that changing or removing benefits can impact your staff negatively, your benefits consultant can help you to communicate any changes to your staff so that they are not left in the dark.
Are employee benefits affected by the new office norm?
Many employers adopted hybrid approaches to the working environment as a result of COVID, so a change in culture has occurred as well as a shift in what it means to reward employees. There are a number of new benefits which are now being prioritised by organisations, which include things like the following:
A medical insurance policy that allows patients to schedule GP appointments online
A greater level of mental health support
Contributions to making your home office more functional
...and so on.
In this regard, I don't think a complete change is required. However, some additions to your reward package could go a long way to enhancing employee morale for those of us who are still getting used to the new work-life balance.
Need Support With Your Employee Benefits Consulting?
In order to find out how you can best match your competition's benefits package, or even better yet, improve upon it, a good start is to do some research on what type of benefits packages they offer. There is a lot of hard work involved in reaching out to the entire market to find out how much it will cost and who offers the best services, which is where a consultant can provide a lot of value.
A number of additional resources are available, including the following:
REBA (Homepage | Reward and Employee Benefits Association (REBA)
Employee benefits (Employee Benefits – Employee Benefits)
How we can help…
At Lemonade Reward, we have decades of experience in supporting some of the UK's most prominent employee benefits packages. Our goal is to simplify employee reward packages by saving HR time and ensuring that they are tailored to the brand and where the company is headed. Here are some of the services we provide:
Design of the benefit program
The renewal of benefits
Communicating with employees and conducting research
Management of the day-to-day operations
Our Benefits and Reward Scorecard shows HR and reward professionals their blind spots, providing instant and actionable steps that will help improve your employee benefits and reward strategy. So even if you think you’re doing everything right and have implemented some of the ideas in this blog, there might still be ways to ramp it up!
The best part is that it is completely free and only takes 3 minutes to complete and receive personalised results! It will help you maintain loyal employees and really push above the competition in your industry.
Our Scorecard will rank you against the following criteria:
Benefits - This will look at the different ways you reward your staff beyond basic pay and bonuses.
Strategy - Designing your rewards package based on the needs of your employees.
People - This will look at your employee's perception of your benefits.
Systems - This will consider the use of technology used to deliver benefits.