How to Maximize Your Benefits Strategy to Resonate With a Diverse Workforce

Point Solution Overload? Streamline Your Benefits Package to Support the Whole Employee.

The evolution of various workforce and societal changes have brought employee wants and needs to the forefront, with personalization, flexibility, and variety being among the most-requested features in benefits offerings today.

The traditional one-size-fits-all approach to employee health and wellbeing fails to solve the individual and varied needs of the workforce, yielding both low Return on Investment (ROI) and Value of Investment (VOI). To truly support employee wellbeing and achieve meaningful results, companies should provide benefits that are tailored to meet the unique needs of each individual.

Employees want to feel empowered to make decisions about the benefits that work best for them and their lifestyle.

However, providing these options can be costly and require high attention to detail for already-overburdened HR teams.

Transformative Benefits for an Evolving Workplace – Custom Rewards and Lifestyle Benefits

During challenging economic times, it's increasingly difficult for companies to simultaneously manage expenses and provide employees with a wide range of customized benefits. Employers struggling to satisfy both should consider adopting a streamlined digital benefits platform. This solution can simplify the process of managing employee benefits by combining the offerings of multiple vendors into one convenient program, relieving HR staff of tedious administrative tasks, and ultimately unlocking hidden opportunities for savings.

Why Custom Lifestyle Benefits Optimize the Employee Experience

Custom Rewards and Lifestyle Benefits platforms offer a cost-effective solution to provide comprehensive solutions to employees in a single, easy-to-manage platform. Services like these offer a one-stop-shop for HR professionals to manage a multitude of stipends, incentives, and pre-tax accounts.

While these are often thought of as simply fringe benefits or perks, these accounts are far more powerful and advantageous than implementing a hoard of point solutions, since many of these single-use-case programs miss the mark and can have low employee engagement.

In recent research performed by Forma, a custom rewards and lifestyle benefits platform, flexible lifestyle spending accounts ranked as the second most valuable employee benefit among all age groups, demographics, and industries - just behind financial wellness 401(k) matching and financial counseling programs.

This ranking demonstrates a remarkable 50% increase in value from employees who have custom lifestyle benefits when compared to those who only have benefit options designated by their employer (e.g., HSA matching, fertility stipends, and tuition reimbursement). This trend highlights the need for offering a flexible lifestyle spending account as an employee benefit. These platforms can be used as alternatives or supplements to traditional employee benefits and come in a variety of forms. They can be used to cover pre-tax commuter savings accounts, post-tax meal delivery benefits, and virtually any employee benefit you can think of. By offering employee custom spending accounts, your organization can gain a competitive edge and provide its employees with greater options and incentives, all while streamlining benefits administration.

Custom Lifestyle and Rewards Benefits are Effective Tools for Improving Diversity and Equity Efforts in the Workplace

With five generations in the workforce, it is no longer possible to use a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to employee benefits. By providing benefits that cater to each individual's unique needs and preferences, companies can demonstrate a commitment to understanding and valuing employees from all socioeconomic statuses, generations, backgrounds and lifestyles. For instance, Millennials and Gen Z employees value wellbeing initiatives and student loan repayment, while Gen X and Baby Boomers prefer healthcare-focused benefits and retirement planning options.

Starting with a traditional set of offerings, you can then add more unique and tailored options to ensure you are meeting the needs of your entire workforce. With an employee spending account program, you have the flexibility to customize the program to fit the specific needs of your employees. By doing this, you can ensure that your employee benefits package is one that is both comprehensive and relevant to all.

Custom lifestyle benefits can help foster a thriving and engaged workplace by providing employees with the curated health and wellbeing resources they crave. In addition, these benefits can help to improve retention efforts by enhancing your employee value proposition and promoting workforce diversity via individual choice and customization. When implementing these sorts of changes, it's important to understand the unique lifestyle needs of your people and work to gather feedback on what benefits would be most impactful to them. This will enable you to select the most suitable spending account option for your workforce and provide employees with the best possible experience, both professionally and personally.

Bottom line -- using custom employee rewards can lead to higher employee productivity and an enhanced ability to attract and retain your workforce.

Engaging your workforce during a time of uncertainty is no easy feat. By staying connected to the wants and needs of your teams, you can ensure your people always get the care and support they need. For more benefits employers should consider offering, read: 5 Excellent Benefits to Offer Employees in 2023.