You may already know what your business can afford when it comes to benefits. But do you know if you’re spending money on the benefits that your employees want? Offering a competitive compensation and benefits package can help provide an overview for starters.
However, unless you ask employees, you may not have a solid understanding of what they value most about the benefits you offer. Furthermore, you may not know what benefits you could be offering that would encourage your employees to stay.
Conducting a survey, having focus groups, or sending out an email asking for feedback can be effective ways to get an honest assessment of employee satisfaction with the benefits you offer. This article provides a quick step-by-step guide that can help small businesses survey their employees.
Step 1: Pick a communication vehicle
What communication vehicle you use to gather feedback depends on many factors including:
The size of your organization,
The comfort level of employees, and
The level of confidentiality required.
If you want very honest feedback, the best route is an anonymous survey. Using a Google form is a free and easy-to-use method for collecting feedback online. The Benefits Survey template from Survey Monkey is another good place to start. If you want to be able to ask follow-up questions and dig deeper into responses, however, you might consider conducting a focus group. If you don’t have many employees and want to track responses, you might use an email or paper form to gather feedback.
Step 2: Start with a message from your leadership team
Regardless of the way you’re gathering input, it’s important that employees know why leaders are asking questions about the benefits plans, and that they also know the leadership team is listening to the answers that employees provide.
Sending a brief note that conveys the right message can help reassure employees that providing benefits is important to the company and that employee feedback about those benefits matters. Consider giving specifics about what areas are under evaluation and might change—that way, if there are changes, employees aren’t surprised.
Step 3: Ask the right questions
This is where the rubber meets the road. If you ask the wrong questions, you’ll end up with data that doesn’t provide you with any insight. You want to explain why it’s a benefit, provide details about how it works, and ask what your employees think. Here are some questions you should consider incorporating into your survey.
Satisfaction (rate level of satisfaction for each offering)
Level of understanding (rate level of understanding for each offering)
Level of importance (Rank the benefit plans in order of importance)
Level of desire (Rank in order of preference)
Current use (Check all that apply)
Depending on what information you need or the programs you have or those you’re considering, some other benefits topics you might cover in your survey:
Insurance: Health, life, medical, dental, vision
Voluntary insurance: Cancer, Long-Term Care
Voluntary accidental death & dismemberment insurance
Short-term and long-term disability
Paid time off
Flexible spending account (FSA)
Tuition reimbursement
Employee support programs (employee discounts, wellness memberships, etc.)
Step 4: Keep it anonymous
Keeping the responses, complaints, and requests anonymous makes it more likely that people will be 100% honest with you. Since benefits are so closely tied to compensation, employees may feel hesitant about asking for too much or giving negative feedback about current policies.
You might be concerned that if all the responses are anonymous, you may not have a good way to ask follow-up questions about specific responses. Don’t worry! You can have the best of both worlds: a nice way to balance anonymity with responsiveness is to add an optional field for a name that says something similar to, “You may include your name here if you would like me to be able to follow up on your responses for clarification.”
It’s wise to first gather feedback from the people who will use the plans: your employees. The feedback-gathering process doesn’t need to be exhaustive. Gathering input not only helps you invest in the right benefits that your employees want and will use, but it also helps you gain employee trust and increase their engagement.
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Article By
The Human Interest TeamWe believe that everyone deserves access to a secure financial future, which is why we make it easy to provide a 401(k) to your employees. Human Interest offers a low-cost 401(k) with automated administration, built-in investment education, and integration with leading payroll providers.
