5 Strategies for Optimal ROI
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, employers should consider every action their organization takes as an investment. How an employer invests their resources can indicate the wellbeing of an organization.
So, how do you maximize the potential of your benefits program? For an optimal ROI, it’s important to understand if what you have is working in your best interests. Let’s look at some practical ways you can gauge the effectiveness of your program and earn a better return.
Check the Temperature
Ask yourself, is my benefits program meeting the needs of my employees? How do you know?
A common strategy can be to utilize surveys to gauge employee satisfaction. Think of these as temperature checks for the workplace pool. Monitoring utilization of benefits programs and employee satisfaction can give employers better insights into what their employees value. Further, employee feedback can offer a perspective that could improve internal processes.
When you reexamine last year’s open enrollment, consider removing the programs that didn’t receive traction and replacing it with something employees may want. This can trim down unnecessary spending while curating your benefits to your employees’ unique needs. A personalized approach instills confidence and care into the employees' overall outcomes, potentially making a difference between a successful and unsuccessful program.
Communication is Key
The journey toward optimal return involves year-round benefits education and communication. Why? Because investing involves trust, which is built over time through direction and understanding. Think about communication as a direct link to overcoming your cost of disengagement.
With effective communication, some organizations have seen a 20-25% increase in productivity. Further, informed employees tend to outperform less-informed employees by 77%. In developing trust, 80% of employees believe communication is crucial.1 When employees are well-informed by the organization, they tend to:
- Place their trust in their organization
- Make decisions that benefits themselves and the organization’s ROI
Mine Your Own Data
By mining and analyzing data, benefits managers can identify cost drivers, inefficiencies, and areas of overspending. This enables them to implement cost-saving measures, negotiate better vendor contracts, and optimize their benefits program to achieve greater financial efficiency.
It’s a small investment, but an important one. Data mining allows benefits managers to measure the return on their benefits program. You can track key metrics, such as cost per participant, employee satisfaction, and program utilization, to evaluate the effectiveness of your initiatives. This data-driven approach can help justify program investments and identify areas for improvement.
Dependent Verification Reviews
One strategy that can be effective in optimizing return on spending is implementing a dependent verification review, or DVR. In its simplest form, a DVR is a review process designed to ensure that you are not covering ineligible dependents on your benefit plans. This proactive approach can help organizations identify and remove ineligible dependents from their coverage, resulting in potentially significant cost savings.
A DVR can also help ensure that your benefit plans remain accurate and compliant. By regularly reviewing and updating dependent information, organizations can maintain the integrity of their benefits program, ensuring that only eligible dependents are covered. Not only does this align with regulatory requirements, but it can also promote fairness and equity among employees, fostering a positive work environment. Our DVR checklist is a handy way to help you get started.
Streamline Vendors
When it comes to vendors, more does not always equal better. Bringing more vendors into your enrollment processes can potentially create complexities to your organization’s workflow. Consider the multiple points of contacts, plus the various apps to manage with multiple vendors, as obstacles with good intentions. Using limited vendors can avoid employer and employee confusion and dissatisfaction.
There are many ways you can customize your benefit plans to meet your employees needs with cost saving measures. Boosting your overall ROI is not something that happens overnight, but each investment may be the difference between avoiding employee dissatisfaction and improving engagement.
This blog is up to date as of June 2024 and has not been updated for changes in the law, administration or current events.
