Rebel HR Podcast: Life and Work on Your Terms

Navigating Employee Feedback for Optimal Benefits

Kyle Roed, The HR Guy Season 5 Episode 226

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Unlock the secrets of employee benefits consulting with insights from Brianna Jacque, a seasoned expert from Cunningham and Butler. Join us as Brianna shares her unique journey from sales to consulting, revealing how she crafts personalized benefits packages that genuinely impact organizations. Discover the common pitfalls HR professionals face, such as catering to the loudest voices, and learn how strategic tools like benchmark data and surveys can transform employee feedback into strategic action. Through the humorous tale of a particularly vocal employee named Rick, Brianna illustrates the importance of balancing employee input with informed decision-making to optimize benefits strategies.

In a world where big data often feels overwhelming, we address the challenges HR faces in managing and interpreting this information to make effective decisions. Highlighting the role of specialized tools and expert guidance, the conversation underscores the necessity for HR to educate and advocate for comprehensive benefits that account for a multi-generational workforce. Key to this is a compelling narrative that communicates value to leadership, securing HR's place at the decision-making table. With a focus on ongoing employee education, strategic communication, and leadership involvement, we explore how to craft a compelling employee value proposition while balancing cost management and satisfaction.

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Speaker 2:

This is the Rebel HR podcast, the podcast about all things innovation in the people's space. I'm Kyle Rode. Let's start the show.

Speaker 3:

Welcome back Rebel HR community Very excited to continue the conversations here at the Iowa State SHRM conference. We are here with Brianna Jock. She is an employee benefits consultant with Cunningham and Butler. We're going to talk about some exciting topics today. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 4:

Thanks, happy to be here.

Speaker 3:

So happy to have you. She just wrapped a session about Iowa women's basketball, so very near and dear to my heart. Go Hawks.

Speaker 4:

Absolutely.

Speaker 3:

Sounds like it was a great session. I am curious to ask you this first question what drove you to get into the thrilling world of employee benefits consulting?

Speaker 4:

Gosh, that is a loaded question, isn't it? I mean, I have been doing it for about nine years. For about nine years, I was recently in a sales role in a totally different industry and was recruited to Cottingham Butler's wellness company Health Check 360, where I traveled across the United States consulting on just wellness programs, and I loved doing that, but I was held to just a product, and so I loved the idea of being able to consult on other things and help these employers out with other things outside of just wellness well-being solutions.

Speaker 4:

So I made the jump over to employee benefits and I quickly figured out how many tools were in my toolkit, how many varying needs there were from various organizations of all sizes. So we get to come in and help them design what an ideal benefits package looks like to them and their employees.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. How often do you talk to a new client and they have no idea what resources and other tools are out there versus what's inside their four walls? How many times do you see eyes open and it's like, wow, I didn't know that existed.

Speaker 4:

Yes, we see that quite frequently. And a lot of times. Where I like to start is really pulling back the curtains to uncover what they have to offer and how can we perhaps better utilize the services they have in place today with their various carriers and vendor partners, and then go dive into it if there's an alternative solution that makes more sense to them, but it happens quite frequently to better educate these employers on all the tools that are at their fingertips.

Speaker 4:

But again, hr professionals are focused on so many other things. They're understaffed. They have a lot of tasks that they're trying to work on. So many other things they're understaffed. They have a lot of tasks that they're trying to work on while serving their employees, and so it helps to partner with someone like Cottingham and Butler that helps them navigate all their tools and how to capitalize on it.

Speaker 3:

So I think that's one of the things I want to talk about today.

Speaker 3:

You know, we actually we actually had this dialogue earlier in this session around leveraging your experts to help you make decisions, because many HR professionals are generalists.

Speaker 3:

Right, we're dealing with a lot of different aspects All the while we're trying to put out fires over here, make strategic decisions over here, manage perceptions over here, and then, oh crap, I need to figure out what my benefits package is and sign the renewal for next year. You know, and it's it's one of like 27 different things we try to do throughout our day, and so, you know, we. One of the things that I recommend is, you know, lean on your experts, right, lean on the Cottingham and Butler's and and Butlers and other benefits experts to help you make decisions. But one of the other challenges that I think we run into as HR professionals is an assumption of what our employees actually want, and I think that can be a little bit of a risky assumption to make at times. So what recommendations do you have for us as we try to consider not only what benefits do we think are appropriate, but as we consider what our employees actually want and need in a benefits package?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, and that is such a huge challenge because oftentimes what you feel and what we see is that the loudest employee gets the resource that they're asking for and, right or wrong, there could be a more strategic approach to help you guide your decisions.

Speaker 4:

And so it's really focusing on marrying together benchmark data but then also surveying your people as well. So benchmarks are great, but it's assuming your company is like everyone else's. Surveys are too great, but oftentimes you get too much information. You don't know how to act upon it. And so trying to get a little more strategic and utilizing surveys that actually incorporate tradeoffs, for example, because, as an employee, we want it all. We want it all, but we don't understand how our asks impact the business financially, executing time-wise, and so actually having them choose. Would you rather have benefit package A or benefit package B, with varying features within your company's budget, so that it's well designed from the beginning? So after the employees complete the survey, you then get actionable data to say these are the benefits that make our employees the happiest, and where should we then go invest?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love that you said the loudest employees trigger. It like triggers a reaction, a visceral reaction For every HR listener out there. How many times has the loudest employee triggered you or your department to say you know what? We should send that dress code reminder policy out? Yeah, those damn loud employees.

Speaker 3:

My reaction when you said that, I literally wrote down loudest employees and circled it in my notes, because I'm like I think every single one of us has this picture of of at least one or two employees that just immediately pops into their head. For me, I'm looking at you, rick, in your gray sweatsuit in every employee meeting and you're you're pissed off about something, right? But the reality is and I kid you not, I've been, I was in a meeting with 300 people and he's up here and he's yelling about whatever and literally like somebody turns around and goes Shut up, rick. And so there's a great reminder that the other employees are like no, he doesn't speak for us, but I think it's really important to remember that a lot of times, that's who HR is interacting with.

Speaker 3:

You're not usually interacting with the vast majority of people. You're usually dealing with people that are noisy, and so making sure that you hear all of the well-rounded feedback is important. And then you touched on something else that I think is really important what I call the big data conundrum, right? So you go, do these surveys, you have these conversations, you do focus groups, whatever you do to solicit the data, the information, and then you almost have too much. So how do you recommend that we distill this information into actionable decisions and then use that to inform how we don't?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. So there are tools out there that will help you capture the data and then make it much more actionable. And I referred to the trade-off survey. So the concept is called a conjoint analysis. It's not a new concept by any means, but I think challenging the average survey or rank your benefits one to five, that's where you get too much information that you just don't know what to do with. So I would say investing in a survey tool that captures actionable data that then helps you bring it to the leadership team to prioritize decisions moving forward based on the budgets that's been set and what is the highest priority for the bulk majority of employees, not just those one or two employees that come running into HR. So I think it's trying to get your arms around. There's a lot of data In an HR. You have access to the most data and so trying to figure out how you capture that, pull it together into a story, approach the leadership team very deserving seat at the table and then how to take action on it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I think what's so great about that approach?

Speaker 3:

Number one I would also recommend totally agree, don't try to do this yourself, like I've done that, where I try to do like a survey monkey with questions and hope that I have something, and then you get these questions, you don't even know how to interpret it or what to do, and it's not, you know, like leverage an expert to help you with it and then leverage experts to help you understand it.

Speaker 3:

Um, but what you're really talking about is is is how do you not only get this data, but then how do you tell a story with it, right? How do you figure out what's the beginning, middle and end, and then how do you drive decisions off of the story that the data tells you right. So I think that's a powerful way to think about this type of information and that's ultimately how you get people to buy in right, believe you. And before we hit record, we were talking a little bit about the proverbial seat at the table, and one of my arguments is if you know your data and you know your business and you know what your employees want and you have a solution now you essentially can't afford not to have a seat at the table. So how do you enable, in your role, hr to have that capability and that ability within their rooms?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I think it's educating on all the options that are out in the market and that come to fruition each and every single day, and knowing, as a benefits broker, that this may not be a solid solution for this HR professional and this team of individuals that you're coaching, but knowing that it may be in the future, because of challenging times or situations that vary, especially in an economy with financial pressures left and right. Educating on what's available, based on the data, and so being able to effectively measure what is going on within your health plan also then prioritizes what decisions should come through based on how your overall dreams are performing.

Speaker 4:

Who's driving this, not just focusing on health insurance rates, but how do you focus on the overall risk strategy and mitigating those risks over time, and maybe putting programs in place that may not be a huge cost saver at the time, but oftentimes it could pay out in the long run, and so you're trying to mitigate the risk as much as you are driving costs down. And so I think, pulling in multiple metrics to be able to benchmark you to you as well, not benchmark you to the average company or the company nationwide, but benchmark you to based on your demographics, based on your overall claims utilization. Where are some strategies that we can then implement so that you can manage costs? And perhaps are you over-investing in some aspect of your benefits package that you could then reinvest somewhere else?

Speaker 4:

Do your employees value that very rich health plan design. Perhaps they don't. Perhaps it's attracting the wrong individual per se the wrong individual per se. Maybe you do need a plan that is more in line with benchmarks so that you can take those savings and reinvest it in digital PTO. Hey, other aspects of your overall benefits package that oftentimes gets mixed.

Speaker 1:

Right right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you know, I think it's. I love what you mentioned there at the end, because so often we get this like this short-sighted, myopic view of benefits and we put it into this buckets, right. So you've got your health bucket, then you've got your dental bucket and your vision bucket. But the reality is, in the broad employee experience, they consider all sorts of different things benefits, so, flexibility of schedule, bto, head insurance, you know there's all these like random things that we consider like ancillary or a different bucket, but it's all the same to employees, right.

Speaker 3:

And if you don't think about it in that context and you don't, you aren't proactive enough in how you budget. Think about this with your, with your teams, including, you know, finance, ceo, operations, all this stuff. Like you're going to miss this, right. Like, if you have the best health insurance program in the in the country and everybody loves it, but the PTO policy sucks, it doesn't matter, they still think their benefits suck, right. You could flip it around and say the exact same thing the other way. If they, you know, love their dental plan but they have no workplace flexibility and can't even take time off to go visit the dentist, well then you're screwing up, right? So you've got to think about it in this context, and this is where I would argue that HR needs to step up advocate for these types of things on behalf of their employees. I think it's part of our job.

Speaker 4:

You can have the best benefit package in the world, but if it's not coupled with a solid employee engagement strategy, you're going to. Most people are going to be unhappy.

Speaker 4:

And so benefits is just one piece of the total rewards pie, if you will. And so trying to figure out not only what your employees value, educating your employees on why a company has made a decision to invest in said benefits For example, I don't think any of your employees are going to come to you because of a long-term disabilities program but if you educate on why you have such a strong long-term disability coverage and really how it fits the overall culture, employees will find value in that, and so oftentimes it's educating on why the company is investing in this.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely so that's my question.

Speaker 4:

Kyle mentioned this earlier in another conversation.

Speaker 1:

You know we've been in HR a long time, a lot of us now.

Speaker 3:

I just started, a few years ago. My role specifically is a benefit leader.

Speaker 1:

But benefits is a big word to use right, and I'm not a medical claims expert. I don't, nor do I need to be.

Speaker 4:

And it still confuses me to this day, and my organization has a relationship with Randall's organization.

Speaker 1:

They help me through all these questions. They help me educate the employees. When you talk about that whole employee value, an employee value preposition strategy, how does Orange start to do that and tell that story of this is what we already have with it? We think it's pretty good. How does that help you?

Speaker 4:

You know, oftentimes people think benefits are just communicated one time a year. During, however life happens, things change. You do need to consistently educate employees throughout the year on the valuable benefits, because things may happen in April when they went through open enrollment in November, they don't remember all the offerings we have in place today. So I think it is pulling in probably some benchmark data to say like, hey, this is where we compare to others of a certain industry, for example, but also just educating on why we feel that we are investing in certain benefits and why it's important, Especially in this generation where you've got five generations of workforce.

Speaker 4:

So, especially in this workforce where people want to come to work and be a part of something bigger than they want, to meaningful work, they want to be very well appreciated both inside the four walls of the workplace and outside. So it's also understanding that employees' needs vary and offering a comprehensive benefits package that meets employees where they are in their life. So understanding that, yes, perhaps accident insurance isn't the best fit for someone right now, but as they have a couple of kids involved in sports like that, is a nice offering that a company has as part of their rounded out benefits strategy. So I think it is. And educating through multiple facets too. We put together these wonderful employee benefit guides and we hope everyone reads them from start to finish, but they don't.

Speaker 3:

Sorry, don't mean to laugh, but yeah. That 37-page booklet? Yeah, sure it's 34.

Speaker 1:

Your communications team did that.

Speaker 4:

But no, it's great.

Speaker 1:

It is great we do educate to do hires and we love it and it's a beautiful document, but it's overwhelming right. How do we do that better?

Speaker 4:

You know, and tapping into your leadership team to help communicate from the top down of why a benefit is so important Goes a long way, goes farther than just saying, yeah, we offer this 401k plan and we match up to a certain percent, but if you've got your CEO standing in front of the company to say who wants to be a millionaire by the time they retire, this is how you do it. People learn different. You've got five generations in the workforce and so you do have to have multiple forms of communication to see what's going to stick.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I am curious from your seat because you have to see this all the time. When you're out there talking with clients or prospective clients, do you run into I can imagine you run into quite a bit the people picking the benefits are probably the HR people or the CEO that wants the benefits they like, versus thinking about the other 300 to 600 employees that will also have these benefits too. Do you ever run into that Like, well, you got to think about your code of work?

Speaker 4:

Absolutely ever run into that like, well, you gotta think about your code of work absolutely. And it is challenging because hr and leadership does have to play a little bit of god. Just pick one to two plans that's going to fit a bulk majority of the organization, or ones that they they enjoy, or the loud employees have asked for. Uh, so I. It is challenging to try to reframe some mindsets that you are making the decision for the workforce, that they are boots on the ground. They have different needs, they have different scenarios and perhaps a different financial situation, and so trying to encourage them to think and put themselves in the shoes of their employees, we do it is challenging.

Speaker 4:

And so that's where our job comes in, that we just educate on what other employers are doing, what we're seeing bringing strategies to the table to say, hey, we do think implementing this strategy could drive down cost X percentage. But also here's the impact to your workforce. And marrying the financial component with employee disruption component or the employee value component is it usually goes the other way.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so you know, non-managers and we killed it all and we had to take away benefits from our some of our senior leaders, but we just cost justified it right and by doing we were able to give a richer benefit to non-managerial staff, but it was, you know, it was definitely some change management but it but it took that.

Speaker 3:

You know kind of that, that data perspective and you know it. Just, it was a budgetary conversation that, hey, we, we need to do this in order, using benchmarks, in order to, you know, kind of meet the benchmarks for our team, but that means you guys don't get this extra special. You know, short-term disability bucket You're in a different short-term disability bucket, but that means everybody now gets short-term disability paid right. So it was definitely, you know, some cost justification, but the reality is, you know, it was the right decision, it was the right thing to do and, yeah, having that data, telling the story with it and justifying that for the greater good, that's part of what HR's job is right. We need to advocate for what's right. So, that being said, I have one final question for you when?

Speaker 4:

do you think HR needs to rebel? Where do they need to rebel? You know, I think at the end of the day, they are the voice for their employees and so being an advocate even more than they are today. But trying to utilize data on what is going on within our benefits where could we more effectively allocate some of these funds that employees will find more value in? And trying to bring a solution that really makes the workforce happy but it's within the budget of the organization and, I think, just understanding that they have all the tab and to partner with the right benefits consultant to help bring the story together, to articulate the message, to then drive which priorities to execute on.

Speaker 3:

First, Absolutely Great conversation. Where can our listeners connect with you and learn more about your organization? Where?

Speaker 4:

can our listeners connect with you and learn more about your organization? I am you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, so Brianna Jack, again employed at Cottingham Butler. You're welcome to email me as well, or give me a call.

Speaker 3:

All right, We'll have that information in the show notes. Feel free to open up your podcast player. Check it out. Brianna, thank you so much for joining us. Great conversation.

Speaker 2:

Thank you All right, that does it for the Rebel HR podcast. Big thank you to our guests. Follow us on Facebook at Rebel HR podcast, twitter at Rebel HR guy, or see our website at rebelhumanresourcescom. The views and opinions expressed by Rebel HR Podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any of the organizations that we represent. No animals were harmed during the filming of this podcast.

Speaker 4:

Baby.

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