Key Takeaways From MetLife's Employee Benefit Trends Study
The recently published MetLife Benefit Trends Study contains some very interesting and perhaps surprising statistics regarding the annual benefits enrollment process.
We encourage you to check it out for yourself (it’s a very quick read). Here are a few of our key take-aways:
- Smaller companies (under 500 employees) have a lower percentage of employees engaged in the annual benefits enrollment process than larger ones.
- On average, employees spend only about 20 minutes on annual benefits enrollment. Most employees (61%) complete their benefit selections as soon as they receive the notification, and they do not revisit or review their choices. Fourteen percent (14%) wait until the last minute. As this study points out, these habits may reflect a lack of knowledge rather than a lack of interest.
- Younger employees are in need of more help with benefit choices than older employees. With the growing popularity of online enrollment, one might think the opposite would be true. This desire for more help is probably more a reflection of a lack of experience with benefits than it is a lack of experience with online tools. Net, “digitally savvy” does not equate to “benefits savvy.”
- Providing effective communications as part of the enrollment experience typically results in good choices being made by the employee, which in turn pays off in the form of greater loyalty, which we know from a previous blog post means enhanced company profits.
- There exists significant and harmful disconnects between enrollment tactics employees find helpful and those tactics actually used by employers.
So what can employers do about this? As we see it, they should make sure they are working with an experienced benefits advisor – one with deep bench strength when it comes to producing best-in-class benefit communication materials and building online enrollment and on-going HR management solutions. And that, of course, is where we come in.
Would you like to read more about maximizing the efficacy of your employee benefit communications? Check-out two of our most popular FREE eBooks on the topic: