7min
According to U.S. Department of Labor, the cost of labor and specifically the cost of employee benefits is one of the largest expenses for many organizations. Aside from wanting to know "where the money went" and understanding the ROI in terms of employee engagement and retention, what can you learn from your benefits data?
Join Ryan Turner, the Solution Engineer at EverythingBenefits as he shares some of his insights into EverythingBenefits reporting and analytics. The subject covered is particularly critical for companies affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and struggling to contain their expenses.
At EverythingBenefits, we love everything data-related and hence, have spent many hours building data management tools and analytics that would give our clients useful insights. We get really excited when our customers share some of the ways they use our reporting to learn how their constituents (aka employees) engage with their benefits.
Here are a few examples of the insights that can be found in our reports.
1. Keeping Track of Employees Who Waived Beneftis: EverythingBenefits keeps track of benefits waived by employees. When an employee decides to waive a mandatory benefit, it's stored in the system for record keeping. This can be important for ACA reporting purposes and also helps ensure that a company meets their carriers' required participation rate. What can be learned from company's waived reporting?
Low adoption rates could be an indication that an offering does not resonate with employees. Some of the reasons for that could be related to the offering itself, organizations' eligibility model, as well as the contribution strategy. Our platform can help correlate the adoption rate to that of our clients' peers of similar size, location, or vertical to help their leadership gauge where their organization may be in terms of relevance to their employees. The benefits broker can share additional insights to help organizations understand the impact of their "waived" number.
2. Benefit Adoption and Utilization Trends: EverythingBenefits' reporting and analytics tools are invaluable for large employers with distributed workforce as well as multiple employer organizations. Our reports make it easy to see how many employees are enrolled in benefits across all of the business units, by location, role, seniority, cost center, GL code, coverage levels, and virtually any other factor. Graphical representation can be made for any data set and can be created in seconds. This can lead to powerful insights into what’s important for various employee groups and can help drive better decision making on a micro level.
Correlating benefits utilization insights with cost factors is invaluable for helping plan future benefit offerings. For instance, understanding that a specific benefit has a high utilization rate and is driving up benefit costs, can signal that an organization can look into negotiating the cost of this benefit or look into alternatives. If a particular location or business unit shows a different trend than the rest of the organization, it warrants a deeper look into what's driving this trend. Finally, benefits that show unusually low utilization rate may be worth reviewing and potentially removing to help lower costs.
3. Data Illuminated: Our reports can provide a detailed breakdown of data by carrier, product, organization and coverage tier. The range of graphical visualization options is virtually unlimited! This offers a holistic insight into clients' benefit offerings and provides the ability to split up the data in any way needed.
4. Employee Churn and Turnover: along with benefits utilization data, we've built employee churn rate analytics into our reports. As you may know, employee churn is the overall turnover of staff at an organization as employees leave and new ones are hired. This data provides a clear picture of the turnover and attrition rate in an organization. While the picture may be changing dramatically for the companies affected by the pandemic, it's important to stay ahead of the trending numbers to manage the impact on the organization.
Correlating churn data against enrollment figures gives insight into what may be driving the churn, and what an organization can do about it. When considering making changes to company's benefits offering, make sure to take a read on the current turnover and churn rate to see the impact post roll out of a new benefit. With open enrollment coming up in the Fall and major changes expected in the carrier rates, these are important considerations to keep in mind.
5. Understanding Your Employee Demographics: Looking at an employer from the lens of the coverage levels within their ecosystem offers important insights into the demographics of an organization. Coverage levels indicate whether employees are covered, either solo, with a spouse, with a family or their dependents. There is a report for that as well! It allows a company to break down all the different types of enrollees to keep track of this information.
What is the benefit of these insights (pun intended)? With many employers striving to build a diverse workplace, taking into account the needs of dependents covered by the employees will provide valuable insights into the types of benefits to offer, as well as expected costs to manage. Benefits are a powerful tool that may make it possible for some employers to "select" certain types of employees. It's not a fair practice and will backfire both short and long term in keeping some of the employees out of the company, as well driving some of the employees out of the company when their family situation no longer fits the company benefits structure - ultimately driving out valuable know how and training.
6. Have Fun: Which employees adopt pet coverage? Are they married or single? Understanding who adopts this benefit (or any other) can help get a better read on what important for employees so that an organization could continue seeking out solutions that delight and motivate their employees.
These are just some of the ways EverythingBenefits reporting can help you keep track of your employee benefits adoption trends and expenses. Stay tuned to our upcoming blog post, where we'll be diving into some of the financial reports available on our platform.
Here is a challenge for you! What other reports have you used in EverythingBenefits to help address your organizational needs?
