Employee Benefits Benchmarking

There are two main types of benchmarking to best analyze the quality and performance of your employee benefits: external and internal. Each benchmarking solution provides a unique set of insights. Using both benchmarking types together provides your business with a comprehensive analysis of the status of your current benefits package and how it can be improved. Read below to learn more about each strategy.

External Benchmarking

External benchmarking is what most businesses think of when they think of benchmarking. This is an analysis of how the business’ benefits compare to other businesses. Oftentimes the analysis compares other businesses that are of a similar size, location, and industry.

The analysis provides a reference point for businesses to determine the quality of their benefits compared to other businesses.

It can answer questions like:

• Is my business paying too much for health insurance?
• Are we contributing enough to employees and their dependents?
• Are there additional benefits we should be offering to our employees?
• How can our employee benefits package be best designed to attract and retain high quality talent?

This can be very useful, even if the benchmark provides just a few variables for the business to target, like Per Employee Per Year (PEPY) costs.

Internal Benchmarking

Internal benchmarking is arguably the most important for your organization. This analysis will determine the satisfaction your employees have with your benefits offering.

The best indicator of the quality of your benefits package is your employees’ perceived value of it. Your employee population has unique needs and goals when it comes to their benefits. So while it’s valuable to understand how your benefits stack up against other businesses, it’s highly informative to hear directly from your employee population how satisfied they are with their benefits.

This type of benchmarking is done by surveying your employees with some simple yet insightful questions regarding their benefits.

The survey questions should answer the following:

• Is the value our employees see in our benefits proportional to our investment in the offering?
• What do our employees desire in a health plan (e.g. greater plan selection, more voluntary benefits, access to specific facilities, etc.)?
• Have we been successfully improving the value of our benefits over time? (This is occurs when comparing internal benchmarks year over year)

New City has a proven internal benchmarking system that drives high employee engagement and results in data-driven, high impact solutions for your organization. Contact us today to see how internal benchmarking can help your employee benefits generate the greatest value for your business and your employees.