Competition to attract and retain the best talent is tough across all industry sectors. Smart businesses know they need to measure the engagement and satisfaction of employees regularly and at different career stages. Common metrics include salary and incentives as well as training and development - so it makes perfect sense to also measure employee satisfaction specific to your employee benefits program.

A great program can have a huge impact on an employee’s level of satisfaction and their level of commitment to their employer. So how do you measure employee satisfaction related to your benefits program?

Participation rates and complaints

It’s common practice to measure an employee benefits program according to participation rates. However, employee participation in a program doesn’t mean they’re engaging with it, think positively of it, or get any real value from it. Likewise, if you’re relying on complaints regarding your employee benefits program to measure employee satisfaction, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree as, much like with bad service in a shop, you may not hear about it – but your team won’t feel committed to stick around.

Maxxia’s 2018 Employee Experience Report found that key contributors to positive employee experience include leadership, the job itself and, importantly, culture. A significant driver of positive culture is to offer great employee benefits.

The value of benchmarking

Andrew Daly, Group Executive Customer Development, Maxxia, advocates using industry-specific benchmarks to assess your employee benefits program.

“We find benchmarking to be a critical part of reaching an absolute verdict on how a program is performing, both in terms of actual savings to each individual employee, but also as a measure of overall value to the business,” he says.

There are many features that can be measured and benchmarked, such as the range of benefits on offer, their suitability for the staff group and opportunities for employee engagement.

Maxxia has developed a comprehensive benefits assessment that enables you to assess the performance of your employee benefits program and benchmark it against other organisations in your industry. “At Maxxia, we collect and analyse data about employee benefits programs across a wide range of industries. It means our clients can assess their program against similar companies,” said Daly.

Contact Maxxia to see if your employee benefits program is delivering maximum value.