A growing number of U.S. employers now consider voluntary benefits to be an essential offering rather than a perk or reward to show employee appreciation. According to the Willis Towers Watson's 2018 Emerging Trends: Voluntary Benefits and Services Survey of large employers, only 5% of respondents claimed voluntary benefits aren’t important to their employee value proposition—compared to 41% of respondents five years ago. Employees have more options than ever, and in order to stay competitive, employers are beginning to up their voluntary benefit offerings. Keep reading for examples of the most popular voluntary benefits.
Why Voluntary Benefits are Important
The workforce is becoming more diverse every day. Voluntary benefits solutions are a cost-efficient way to provide additional coverage to all different types of employees. These employees tend to migrate toward companies that offer choice and flexibility. By offering a variety of voluntary benefits, you can give your company a competitive edge and attract the highest quality talent.
Employee voluntary benefits can act as a financial safety net for many employees, giving them peace of mind and higher overall satisfaction. When people are able to properly take care of themselves and their families due to voluntary benefit trends, they become happier and more productive employees.
Offering the Right Voluntary Benefits
Analyze your company’s existing benefit offering and pay attention to what your employees want. Obviously, each employee’s wants and needs will vary, but it is important to take stock of your company and get a sense of the types of people you employ. This will dictate which types of voluntary benefits you choose to offer.
For example, long-term care options may appeal to older employees because they can help pay for the care required for themselves or family members with chronic illness or disabilities. However, millennials may not be as concerned with long-term care benefits, as many of them are more focused on their student loan debt. Offering any type of student loan debt repayment assistance will help attract and retain young talent.
Employees who have families or are planning to have families are drawn to supplemental health care options because they can be tailored to their children’s specific needs. Professional development programs and training opportunities can attract motivated individuals to your company and help current employees grow within their positions. Employers can even show an interest in their employees’ general health and wellness by offering a discount purchase program for fitness wearables.
Other popular voluntary benefits include pet insurance, identity theft protection, personal financial planning offerings, supplemental health care options and legal plans.
Administering Benefits Properly
Administration of these benefits needs to run smoothly. Due to their complexity, voluntary benefits can pose roadblocks during administration, so it’s important to create a step-by-step plan. Start by communicating with employees and providing quality education tools on the types of voluntary benefits your company is offering.
You may choose to provide comprehensive enrollment with both core and voluntary benefits in order to streamline the process. This doesn’t work for all employers, and many choose to stagger voluntary enrollment to allow more time for employees to make thoughtful decisions. Lastly, ensure that your employees continue to stay updated on the voluntary benefits they chose. Many employees may forget the types of benefits they signed up for and not utilize them as often as they should. Keeping your employees informed after the enrollment process will help them get the most out of their coverage.
Clarity offers a powerful and streamlined benefits technology, a cloud-based platform, to simplify plan selection and administration of benefits while reducing costs. Our team is formulated to eliminate redundancy and keep your systems up-to-date by integrating our software with your other vendors. We promote employee self-service, and provide stellar customer service and automated ACA compliance to eliminate any guesswork. Learn more about how you can simplify the voluntary benefits administration process at Clarity Benefit Solutions.
Sources:
2. https://www.bostintegrated.com/2017/11/why-voluntary-benefits-are-so-important/
4. https://www.benefitspro.com/2018/01/05/on-trend-9-top-voluntary-benefits-for-2018/
7. https://www.benefitspro.com/2018/07/05/the-evolution-of-voluntary-expanding-voluntary-ben/
