Every company dreams of getting straight answers from their employees on how the company is running and working for them. Gauging employee satisfaction is a huge task, with equally huge goalposts. You want to figure out how to increase employee retention, boost productivity, create a thriving and engaged company culture, and present your company as a desirable place to work in order to draw in more talent.
That’s not too much, right? So where to start? When it comes to your employee’s benefits, there are a few ways you can find the answers. While it’s unlikely your employees will race up to your team to tell you how much they love (or hate) their new healthcare plan, there are plenty of other forums where they’ll be happy to share their real feelings.
Workplace Surveys
A common instrument in any HR toolkit, the workplace survey can take many shapes. Email, paper, anonymous, confidential, mandatory, optional, annual—you get the idea.
Company-wide surveys aren’t an all-telling crystal ball, however. Harvard Business Review has noted that surveys don’t always uncover the problems stewing deep within companies, pointing out that a UPS survey found high employee satisfaction just ten months before a major strike related to the growing part-time workforce
With surveys, the devil is in the details: what questions to ask, how to word them, and how to assess the results. Get the combination wrong, and your survey could be a costly dead-end. For that reason, sending out a simple survey with rankings or multiple-choice can be useful, but it might not ever show you the full picture.
Glassdoor Reviews
Checking your Glassdoor reviews can give you some insights into how your current and former employees feel about your benefits. These reviews include questions about benefits, including health insurance, voluntary benefits, and retirement options. And because Glassdoor is used by jobseekers to learn more about companies, the marks you get on Glassdoor could make or break a decision about a job offer, or even if they apply for a job with your company.
Although Glassdoor’s reliability is sometimes called into question, there’s no doubt that most plugged-in individuals rely on peer review before making just about any decision. Just witness the popularity of sites like Trustpilot, or Yelp. Glassdoor provides easily searched, neatly indexed reviews. If employees aren’t satisfied with benefits, negative Glassdoor reviews could be hampering your company’s recruitment efforts.
Employee Suggestion Programs
Most companies have suggestion boxes, whether it’s a dedicated inbox for employees to email suggestions or an actual box to slip their ideas into. Once you’ve sifted through the requests for longer lunch breaks and implementing three-day weekends are usually popular ones, you’re bound to find a few interesting ideas which give you insight into how your employees really feel about their workplace and benefits.
Updating Your Benefits
Your employees have probably done a good job of finding gaps in service and missed opportunities in your benefits. They’re just waiting for the right way to tell your team about them. Once you’ve begun collecting survey results, reviews, and suggestions, you can start the process of filtering and grouping them into categories. Are your benefits programs too difficult to access? Missing key elements your employees want? Maybe your website is unwieldy, and can’t be used on mobile devices—a big problem for employees who rely on phones or tablets and don’t own a home computer.
As you seek to solve problems and grow your benefits into a program which receives rave reviews and top marks on surveys, look for holistic solutions that will streamline your processes for years to come. WBD specializes in one-platform solutions to complicated benefits and compensation packages. From employee-facing, mobile-responsive sites that actually increase engagement, to HR-friendly dashboards that make communications and management a breeze, WBD’s suite of tools will help you transform your benefits for the better.
Click here to learn more, or contact us to start boosting employee satisfaction and engagement with your benefits.