It’s a hard but simple truth these days: If your employees aren’t happy with their benefits, they are far more likely to take a job offer elsewhere. You can counter this by ensuring the best possible alignment between your benefits package and your employees’ needs and preferences.
To offer benefits that actually meet peoples’ needs , it’s important to touch base with the stakeholders most affected by them: your employees. Organizations that consistently use an employee benefits survey (EBS) gain clearer insights and better decision-making.
If you’re wondering how to improve employee satisfaction, consider the EBS. Here’s why, and how to make this powerful tool work for your company.
Why are employee benefits important for businesses?
An organization’s benefits packages do far more than merely meet employee expectations or satisfy legal requirements. Some of the most impactful ways they benefit your business include
- High-quality applicants who accept offers and stick around: Competitive benefits are significant factors in a prospect’s decision to accept a job offer and an employee’s decision to stay.
- Increased employee engagement and satisfaction: When your employees feel valued and supported, they tend to put more of themselves into their work, boosting both engagement and productivity.
- Enhanced employee well-being and health: Healthcare and wellness benefits directly support an employee’s vitality, strength, and ability to both do their job. Improved healthcare also means better mental health, higher rates of employee engagement, reduced absenteeism, and a lower risk of burnout.
- Increased market competitiveness: Companies that offer desirable employee benefits gain a competitive advantage by attracting more skilled talent and giving employees the freedom to focus on productive, creative work.
- Cost savings to the organization: Although benefits cost employers money on the front end, they also result in cost savings over time through lower turnover, healthier employees, and reduced absenteeism.
These are just a few of the reasons why it’s important to understand how your workers feel about current benefits and which ones matter most to them.
How an EBS helps your business stay competitive
Employees aren’t a single, unified force. Different benefits mean different things to different workers. For example, people with children might prefer flexible work options and schedules, while others may prefer health club and wellness benefits. You might not be able to fill each employee’s wish list individually, but you can understand the general trends and overall preferences.
You also need to evaluate how well critical information about those benefits is communicated to the employees. A business might offer an extremely competitive benefits package, but if employees don’t understand what’s available or find the benefits platform difficult to use, the business isn’t making the most of the opportunity.
Surveys uncover these data points and preferences for your analysis and consideration. A well-designed EBS can elicit a wide array of information from your workforce, including
- What your workers need and want in their benefits packages
- How well your current benefits meet those needs
- What other benefits you should offer
- How your benefits compare with other organizations
- How well your company administers and communicates information about employee benefits
Soliciting and incorporating feedback from employees through an EBS is important for optimizing your benefits and making sure your workforce has the information needed to make use of those benefits.
Best practices for an EBS
Your survey is only as good as the way you administer it and the questions it asks. To optimize your organization’s surveys and questions, consider implementing the following best practices:
- Keep it short and simple. Avoid multiple-part questions, and use plain language. By the same token, don’t make the survey or the questions so short that they stop being useful.
- Stay laser-focused on the relevant issues. Consider sending out many short surveys throughout the year, each tightly focused on a different aspect of your benefits.
- Use some open-ended questions in addition to scales and ratings to encourage fuller responses.
- Make the survey anonymous, and ensure your employees know their identities are protected to get more authentic responses.
- Provide explicit instructions on taking and submitting the survey.
- Align question formats to the kind of information you’re looking for. For example, a Likert scale question lists a series of statements and a set of answer options for each, such as “strongly agree,” “agree,” “neither agree nor disagree,” “disagree,” and “strongly disagree.”
- Segment your responders through a series of questions for the best and most actionable data. Consider asking employees to specify age, department, office location, gender identity, and parental status at a minimum.
Finally, consider offering incentives to encourage employees to submit their surveys by the due date.
The 31 best EBS questions to ask
For a full annual survey, it’s best to divide questions into specific groups to help employees focus on the relevant category of benefits. Following are 31 of the best questions to ask, divided by category.
General questions
- Rate the specific benefits below by order of importance to you.
- Tell us how easy or difficult you find it to use your benefits and whether you experience any difficulties in accessing them.
- Do you think we effectively communicated your benefits to you during onboarding, both verbally and in your new hire packet?
- What other benefits should we offer?
- How competitive are our benefits compared to other organizations?
Questions about health insurance
- How satisfied are you with your health insurance?
- Do you feel confident that your health insurance coverage will be adequate to meet your future needs?
- On a scale of one to five, with one being “very affordable” and five being “not at all affordable,” how would you categorize your premiums? Deductibles? Co-pays?
- What are the most valuable aspects of your health insurance coverage? Least valuable?
- What’s missing from your health insurance plan right now?
Questions about retirement benefits
- How well do you feel you understand your retirement plan?
- Do you think our contribution to your retirement plan is adequate?
- Are you currently making contributions to a retirement savings plan?
- Are you confident that, given current contribution levels, you’ll be able to retire relatively comfortably?
- How would you rate the financial and retirement planning resources we currently make available to employees?
Questions about time-off policies
- How would you rank your understanding of our sick leave and paid time off (PTO) policies?
- Do you think our PTO and sick leave offerings are adequate?
- Do you feel that you’re supported when you’re sick?
Questions about family-related benefits
- Do you understand the rights you have under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and our parental leave policies?
- Do your parental leave and childcare benefits meet your family’s needs? If not, how can we improve?
Questions about wellness programs
- How familiar are you with our wellness program?
- Do you participate in our wellness program?
- If you don’t currently participate in our wellness program, what would help entice you to participate?
- What wellness activities, benefits, or initiatives should we consider adding to our benefits package?
Questions about stock options and equity
- Are you aware of our stock options/equity program?
- How important are our stock options and equity to you?
Questions about flex work
- How important are flex work, work from home, and hybrid work opportunities to you?
- How satisfied are you with our flex work options?
- How can we improve our flex work program and offerings?
Questions about tuition reimbursement and professional development
- Do you currently take advantage of the professional development and tuition reimbursement benefits we offer? Why or why not?
- How well do you understand how our professional development and tuition reimbursement benefits work?
Jotform: The EBS solution you need
One thing that can revolutionize your EBS and make it easy to elicit the information you need from your workforce is the right tool. You can use human resources form templates, or expensive software, but one of the best affordable tools available for this purpose is Jotform.
Choose from Jotform’s Employee Benefits Survey questions or select one of our Employee Benefits Survey templates and easily customize it based on your needs. Or elect to create your survey from scratch in minutes, using our easy-to-master drag & drop form builder. Add different question types such as multiple choice, single choice, Likert scale, dropdown, closed-ended, or open-ended to further fine-tune your survey and improve your results.
After your employees complete your survey, you can track and manage their survey responses with Jotform Tables. Visualize and analyze your data by creating visual reports from your form submissions to make it even easier to grasp the big picture as well as the finer details.
With Jotform, you can even go a step further and create an HR app. You can then add your EBS to the app, letting your employees fill it out easily using their mobile devices.
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