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Practical Steps to Improve the Value of Employee Benefits and Retain Your Best Talent
By: Benefits by Design | Tuesday July 8, 2025
Updated : Monday July 7, 2025
When you’re trying to attract more qualified talent to your business, it often requires more than just offering a good salary. While everyone wants to make sure they’re fairly compensated for the work they do, more and more employees today are looking for employers that offer valuable benefits packages.
As a business, offering comprehensive benefits to your employees helps to show them that you value their contributions and aren’t solely focused on your bottom line. However, it’s essential to acknowledge that to create a valuable benefits offering, you can’t simply follow a one-size-fits-all approach.
Luckily, there are some practical steps you can take to make sure the benefits you provide are valuable for both potential job candidates and your current employees.
Analyze Your Current Benefits Offerings
Before you start putting together new benefit options for your employees, you’ll first want to do some homework ahead of time. It’s essential to get a sense of what other companies in your industry are offering their employees as a standard. This will help you develop a package that not only competes with other businesses but also gives you an opportunity to let your company stand out from others.
Leverage your benefits technology to help you extract helpful reporting and analytics that can be used to improve your current offerings. For example, you could extract your current benefits format and compare it against industry benchmarks based on the size and category of your business. This helps you to keep your offerings more competitive while also identifying any potential gaps worth filling.
Create a Modern Benefits Framework
When designing your benefits packages, it’s essential to consider the modern needs of your workforce and implement the right solutions to address them. Modern benefits frameworks typically involve:
Looking After Employee Health and Well-Being
Almost all benefit packages incorporate some type of health coverage for employees. However, rather than just providing the bare minimum requirements, a good practice is to try to incorporate more flexibility in the type of coverage offered to each employee.
You could provide your staff with multiple coverage options they can choose from, depending on their needs and the amount of premiums they wish to pay. You could also incorporate Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) or access to mental health resources.
Helping with Financial Stability
Benefits packages can play an essential role in helping your employees achieve more financial stability in the long term. By offering them access to Group Retirement Savings Plans (GRSPs), you can actively encourage each employee to be more responsible with their savings while also contributing a percentage of what they decide to put into these programs.
Supporting a Good Work-Life Balance
For many employees, creating a healthy work-life balance is highly beneficial when deciding to work with and stay with an employer. The great thing is that, as a business, there are multiple ways you can build this into your offerings.
For example, by offering flexible scheduling, remote working capabilities, and increased paid time off (PTO), you can show your employees that you value their ability to balance their personal and work lives.
Implement and Communicate Your Benefits Effectively
Equally as important as providing comprehensive benefits is showcasing their value to employees.
Here are a few ways you can communicate the value of your benefits packages effectively:
- Keep your explanations clear and simple – Most benefits providers tend to use a lot of industry jargon in their documentation booklets. Rather than just handing these over to your employees, look for ways to simplify the messaging they provide so that it’s easier for everyone to understand. One way to do this is by providing a one-page summary of all the benefits offered and easy-to-understand instructions on how they work.
- Use a mix of platforms to share information – There are multiple ways you can communicate to both potential and current employees all the benefits available to them. Use your company website, job postings, and social media platforms to speak regularly about the various company perks and benefits offered to your teams. This helps to keep them fresh in mind and encourages more employees to make sure of them.
- Help your teams make smarter coverage choices – When providing multiple benefits options to choose from, it can be helpful to provide employees with various resources they can use to make smarter coverage choices for themselves and their families. Certain best-of-breed benefits platforms can offer employees interactive tools and premium calculators that they can use to weigh all their options and select the coverage that provides them the most value.
Help Your Employees See the Value in Their Benefits Offerings
Regardless of whether you manage your employee benefits in-house or outsource administration to other teams, it’s important to never lose sight of the importance of highlighting the value that your benefits packages bring to your employees.
By following the practical tips provided, you’ll make sure all the benefits you select meet the needs of your employees while helping your business to attract and retain great talent.
Looking for more retention strategies?
How to stay competitive with modern approaches to employee retention
About the author: Frank Mengert continues to find success by spotting opportunities where others see nothing. As the founder and CEO of ebm, a leading provider of employee benefits solutions. Frank has built the business by bridging the gap between insurance and technology driven solutions for brokers, consultants, carriers, and employers across the US.
