Retain Employees with Great Benefits
Whether your insurance plan renewal deadline is January 1st like many businesses or a different day entirely, it’s never too early to be thinking about how you can improve your health plan for the coming year. Conducting an employee benefits survey is a great place to start in determining what changes might be beneficial in your overall benefits package.
You might be thinking, “Yeah, that sounds great, but how do I go about creating an employee benefits survey?” If so, then you are in the right place! This blog post will walk you through the steps of creating a practical and useful employee benefits survey.
Let’s Start at the Very Beginning
. . . a very good place to start. (Any Sound of Music fans out there?)
The first thing that you should do when planning for the distribution of an employee benefits survey is to create a well thought out list of questions. While you don’t want the survey to be so lengthy that it deters employees from doing it, you do want to make sure that you are hitting on all of the relevant points to help you make your health plan decision.
The following list of questions is a great place to start, but keep in mind that you will likely have additional questions that need asked specific to your business and/or your current or potential health plan offering. It’s also a good idea to keep the survey anonymous. Employees may be more candid when answering these questions if they know their answers are confidential.
Sample Employee Benefits Survey Questions
- Are you currently enrolled in our company’s health plan coverage? If not, please explain why.
- Are other members of your family (spouse, children) enrolled in our company’s health plan coverage? If not, please explain why.
- Were all of your previous doctors and providers in-network with our company health plan?
- Do you find your portion of the health plan premium to be a manageable amount?
- Do you feel that your maximum deductible is too high?
- What do you feel is most important - lower costs or more provider options?
- On a scale of 1-10, how important is out-of-network coverage to you?
- Have you been satisfied with the level of customer service that you have received from our health plan provider? (list the name of your provider)
- Are you interested in an HSA-compatible plan where money is set aside from your paycheck pre-tax to help cover medical expenses?
- Do you feel confident that you understand all of the employee benefits that our company offers?
- Please select the employee benefits that you believe our company currently offers: Medical Insurance, Dental Insurance, Vision Insurance, Life Insurance, 401K Plans, Stock Options, Short or Long Term Disability, Education Reimbursement, Fitness Memberships, Other (please describe)
- Please select the employee benefits that you would like for our company to offer: Medical Insurance, Dental Insurance, Vision Insurance, Life Insurance, 401K Plans, Stock Options, Short or Long Term Disability, Education Reimbursement, Fitness Memberships, Other (please describe)
- On a scale of 1-10, how important is dental insurance to you?
- On a scale of 1-10, how important is vision insurance to you?
- What do you like the most about our current benefits plan?
- What do you like the least about our current benefits plan?
- How does our health plan compare to other companies at which you’ve worked? Better? Worse? Please explain.
- Do you have any additional recommendations for improving our employee benefits plan?
As you can see with the examples above, it’s beneficial to ask open-ended questions whenever you can. While yes or no questions might be easier to tally the results, they won’t give you the full picture in terms of what your employees really desire, and with them you will likely miss out on information that you would never think to ask.
Time for Results
So now that you’ve gone through and tweaked your list of questions to ensure that all of the employee benefits that your company offers are addressed, it’s time to put your survey together and send it on its merry way. This can be done a number of different ways.
If your employee base is tech-savvy, you might consider an online platform such as SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. This format is especially helpful for large businesses where physical surveys would be a logistical nightmare.
Smaller businesses on the other hand, might fare perfectly fine with simple paper surveys. Just make sure that you leave plenty of room for your employees to write for those open-ended questions. You’re more likely to get a longer written response if you allow ample space for your questions.
Whichever format you choose, you will likely want to include a disclaimer to your employees that they should refrain from disclosing detailed personal health information within their responses. A simple statement to that effect at the beginning of your survey (whether online or printed) should suffice.
Once you’ve sent the survey link out or passed out your printed surveys, you will want to establish a timeline for submitting responses. Don’t give your employees too much time to complete the survey or it will likely get forgotten amidst the rest of their workload. Aim for approximately a one week turnaround for survey responses, and make sure to send out a reminder when the deadline is approaching.
Next it’s time to comb through the responses to determine what plan offerings you might want to tweak for the upcoming year. Make a list of insights that you gathered from your survey and then schedule a meeting with your friendly PHP representative. They can direct you towards plans and ancillary products that might help you better meet your employees’ ever-changing needs.
So Why Does This All Matter?
As we’ve shared previously, employee benefits plans are critical to recruiting and retaining top talent. In fact, 1 in 3 millennial workers have turned down a job offer because of lackluster health insurance, and 83% of employees say health insurance is extremely important in deciding whether or not to change jobs.
We already know that employees are putting more and more emphasis on their benefits package, so it only makes sense that employers should be putting more effort into the planning and administration of these packages as well.
To keep your employees happy, you have to understand what they really want. Thankfully that is possible with the help of employee benefits surveys. Get started on your survey today with these helpful tips, and make sure to contact PHP to find the best match for you based upon your employee survey results.
