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In times of crisis—and all other times, too—employers need to be able to communicate the most helpful resources to employees in the right moments. Especially now with the COVID-19 pandemic on the mind, ensuring easy access to useful information about health benefits is crucial.
But in order to communicate the right benefits, you need to have the right benefits in the first place. HR/benefits leaders assess their total-rewards packages every year, but historically, it has been difficult to pinpoint a metric to measure success as it relates to the value employees place on their benefits.
The good news? There is, in fact, a metric that can make this part easier and ensure your approach is more effective than ever. It’s called the benefits net promoter score, or benefits NPS.
Meet your new metric
You’ve probably heard of net promoter score (or NPS). It’s a widely used and reliable way to measure a company’s favorability among its customers—and ultimately, to gauge customer loyalty. Now, HR leaders can use it to measure employee satisfaction with benefits (and gauge retention as a result).
Customers give their ratings on a scale between zero and 10, and are deemed a promoter, a detractor, or passive according to the scale below. The NPS equals the percentage of your promoters, minus the percentage of detractors, and falls anywhere on the scale of -100 to +100.
For HR leaders, benefits are the “product” being offered and employees are the customers. So instead of measuring benefits satisfaction simply through sentiment surveys, consider using the metric that correlates satisfaction to employee loyalty: benefits NPS.
Making benefits NPS actionable
While HR has typically relied on sentiment surveys to understand overall satisfaction at work, benefits NPS shows HR leaders how benefits are driving those sentiments. With this information, you can really put your benefits to work to engage your employees in the way they need it.
The goal of any metric, of course, is to inform the right tactics and strategy for you to boost engagement—this means you need to measure at a level you can act on. Measure benefits NPS at the category level (Health and Wellness, Financial and Retirement, Time Off, etc.), as well as the overall level (your total rewards package as a whole). This helps you focus on what’s most valuable to the population(s) you’re trying to attract and keep. If you think of yourself as a benefits marketer, this is how you market to your target audience.
Filter by department, for example, and you may see that engineers rank Time Off as their most valued benefit, while your sales team favors Financial and Retirement. Segment even further and you can uncover intriguing insights related to age. Trying to recruit seasoned senior-level managers? Or staff up your creative team with trend-savvy millennials? The scores across the categories will provide a benchmark of which benefits are most appealing to which demographics—and will help you define tactics to meet those hiring goals.
Strategize smarter
With benefits NPS at your side, you can plan ahead using objective, quantitative data. This will help you make direct connections between total rewards, employee satisfaction, and overall business goals.
Above all else, however, it’s critical you have the tools at hand to communicate these benefits in a rapid, relevant way to individuals. From the high-NPS benefits to the absolute necessities for health and safety in times of crisis, make sure you have a platform that enables smart communication.
