An employee survey can give you some great insight into what employees think about your current benefit package, but could you also be setting yourself up for negative responses and backlash? There are both pros and cons of asking your employees to complete a benefit survey.
One of the best reasons to do a survey is to gauge your employees’ satisfaction level with the current benefit package offered at the company. Are there benefits that are glaringly missing in your package that would increase their satisfaction? Are there benefits being offered that are not important to employees and possibly being underutilized? You can even have your employees rank the separate benefits in the order of importance to them.
If you are a smaller group or fully insured, an employee survey may be the only way to find out what your medical utilization is on your plans. You can ask employees to answer questions about whether they met their deductible or out-of-pocket maximum that year. You can ask how many times they go to the doctor for preventive care visits or for illness. You can also ask how many prescriptions they fill in a month and what the average cost of those medications is. This information can then be used to target certain plan features that may better fit the needs of your population.
If you are thinking about implementing a wellness program, you can also find out what type of services and programs your employees might value most.
One of the drawbacks of doing a survey is that if you ask what employees want, it may create an expectation that they will get what they ask for. If the budget is tight that year and the requested benefits can’t be offered, there may be some dissatisfaction over that decision. One way to solve this is to ask them to rank priorities or pose a tradeoff of what they would be willing to give up to get something else that is more important to them. If you ask about their personal plan utilization, you might receive a little grumbling. We recommend three ways to cope with that:
1. Explain the reasons you are asking for personal info;
2. Stress that the survey is anonymous; and
3. Emphasize that you as the employer care about their benefits package and want to make sure the plans are meeting their needs.
Fall River offers employee surveys to our clients as part of our pre-renewal planning. If a company is unsure about their next steps in the benefits arena, a survey can give valuable information about carrier or plan changes that need to be made, employer contribution changes to consider, and benefits that should be added or done away with. We will often do a survey for our new clients, which many times reveal problems that have not been addressed in the past. Companies can sometimes uncover areas of spending on one item that could be better spent on a benefit that employees value much more.
In our experience, the risk of doing an employee survey is usually outweighed by the beneficial information you receive. Feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more ideas and suggestions on making a survey work for your group!
