Stop us if you’ve heard this tale before. You’re a business owner trying to find the right people to help realize your vision – the reason you started your business in the first place. This proves to be tough. You hire someone you think is ‘it’, the be-all-end-all of new hires. Yay! Finally. Except…..three months later that stellar employee leaves for an ‘opportunity they can’t pass up’. What?! Why does this happen over and over and over and over again? Why don’t people stay, and why is it so hard to replace a quality employee in the first place? The real question is, why do people choose to leave your company? And how do group benefits help attract and retain top talent in 2019?
The Truth Can Be Difficult
The truthful answer to this question can be tough to face. Maybe your working environment is not so great. Maybe employees don’t feel valued. Maybe you have a crisis of leadership that is driving employees toward the door. Or perhaps, in a world where having some sort of benefits safety net is so critical, some of your employees feel the need to look elsewhere because you simply aren’t competitive with your benefits package, or worse, offer nothing at all.
So, how do you attract good people, and keep them long-term once they’ve been hired while keeping the good people from leaving? And how do group benefits help attract and retain top talent?
Compete With The Big Guys
If you’re looking to take talent from large corporations, you need to plan on having a competitive benefits program. Anyone leaving a large company is going to have “large company” benefits. If you don’t have multiple benefit offerings or any offerings at all, consider starting small with some voluntary offerings, telemedicine or company sponsored life insurance. You can offer dental, vision, life and disability without it costing the company anything other than the time it takes to administer.
You can provide your employees and their families unlimited, no cost access to doctor’s over the phone for less than $10 a month per household. Company sponsored life can be as inexpensive as $10-$15 a month per employee, depending on how much you offer.
Be Flexible
Be flexible with work schedules and allow employees to work from home once a week or once every 2 weeks. Commuting can be a bear in big cities and the flexibility can be a nice perk. Sometimes it’s the little things that can make all the difference.
Infuse Some Fun At Work
Yes, it’s possible to create a work environment where fun is a significant ingredient to success and goal achievement. Go do something fun every once in a while with your staff. Go see a movie during working hours, go to an amusement park, take everyone to lunch at a nice restaurant on a Friday. Guess what? They will feel valued and it will also allow them to reduce stress and perform better at their given responsibilities. Make some efforts to build the camaraderie and relationships between your employees. It will make work not seem so much like “work”.
Engage Your Employees
Talk to your employees, see what benefits are important to them from your company as far as benefits are concerned. It may not be insurance related. Maybe they want some telecommuter benefits or a daycare reimbursement program. Maybe they really need vision coverage because everyone in their family has bad eyesight. Maybe they want a Flexible Spending Account. Maybe if they just had a new laptop or Surface Pro for work they’d be ecstatic. See what interests them and take that into consideration when doing you annual planning or benefit review. You could be wasting lots of time / money if you are focusing on things that are not important to your employees. The best way to find out? If you’re a smaller company you could do one-on-one chats to discover what’s most important to them benefits-wise, or, if you’re a larger organization, you can send a more formal survey.
Engage Your Former Employees
If you are just now starting to think about this issue and it is happening as we “speak”, be sure you are conducting exit interviews, either in person, online or through a 3rd party. You need to know why people are leaving, what drove them to your company and now what is driving them away. Today’s economy is the best it’s been in many years and good employees are hard to come by. Most companies are having a hard time filling positions, so the ball in most cases is in the hands of the employee (or job-seeker). Use the extremely important data that you can get your hands on from an exit interview to help stop the bleeding and put some protections in place. Yet another illustration of how group benefits help attract and retain top talent.
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About Holloway Benefit Concepts
HBC was founded in early 2011 by Ryan Holloway. After serving over 8 years on active duty in the US Marine Corps, Ryan transitioned from being a full-time marine into an HR professional in early 2003. This began a journey and awoke a passion for helping companies who value their employees. After spending time working with a COBRA and FSA Administrator, an insurance company, and a large brokerage, Ryan realized that there were more unique and creative solutions for businesses than other companies were willing or able to realize. Seizing on his own entrepreneurial spirit, Ryan set out to found an independent agency designed to provide unique and original insurance solutions. to learn more about HBC, visit https://hollowaybenefitconcepts.com/
