Employee benefits programs are playing an increasingly critical role in corporate strategy, as they can help address employee loyalty and retention goals, and can also have a significant impact on the bottom line. Companies that benchmark against similar organizations and employee populations are well positioned to gain the insights necessary to design even more competitive and effective benefits programs.

As a practice, benchmarking supports data-driven planning and decision-making, and can be the catalyst for the re-examination and refinement of benefits strategies. Specifically, benchmarking exposes decision-makers to external, and often new, perspectives on benefits practices and can help better align a company’s benefits offerings, strategies and communications with employee attitudes and expectations.

To leverage benchmarking in the benefits planning and decision-making process, companies may consider the following:

Review Benefits Goals and Key Issues


Before using MetLife's Benefits Benchmarking Tool, review existing benefits programs and survey employees to discover their benefits priorities. This preliminary research can help identify broad themes to explore and questions that can be answered with benchmarking data.

For example:

• What are the company’s most important benefits objectives? Retaining employees? Controlling costs? Increasing job satisfaction?
• How important are certain benefits to employees? Do these preferences vary across different segments of the workforce?

The MetLife Benefits Benchmarking Tool groups the benefits topics into key themes based on trends in the marketplace to help you focus on the issues most important to you. For example, you can choose “Employee Retention & Loyalty Goals ” and a variety of topics related to that theme. Choose all topics related to a trend – or customize your analysis by choosing individual topics within each benefit topic grouping.

Consider the Employee Base


Employee needs, expectations and concerns about benefits vary widely among employee groups. The MetLife Benefits Benchmarking Tool enables you to benchmark employee attitudes and perceptions by employee job type, household income, generation and life stage. Analyzing the data by characteristics similar to the company’s employee population will help you gain a greater depth of understanding for employees’ needs and wants – and help you design stronger benefits programs that seek to retain and attract top employees.

Some questions to consider:

• Is the employee base narrowly focused and uniform by age group or income level, or is it more broadly diversified?
• Are there multiple generations working within the same organization? How do their needs and expectations vary?

Customize Your Query


With more than 35 benefits topics to choose from, employers can see how their benefits objectives, strategies and offerings compare to those of their peers and develop a deeper understanding of their employee population’s attitudes and perceptions. The variety of benchmarking criteria allows you to customize your analysis based on specific company or employee characteristics.

For insights by criteria, click the links below:
Region
Company Size
Company Type
Industry
Employee Job Type
Household Income
Generation
Life Stage

Access Additional Insights


Gain more insights into the benefits topics by linking to other industry-leading MetLife studies that the Benchmarking Tool recommends based on your specific benchmarking analysis. These studies can help you further explore the topics and perspectives that are important to you.

The following is a sample of related studies you may want to review:

• The 6th Annual MetLife Study of Employee Benefits Trends
  Access the latest insights on trends in employee benefits.
• The 2008 MetLife Study of the American Dream
  Learn how employee benefits play an important role in helping employees achieve the American Dream.
• Open Enrollment at a Crossroads: White Paper
  Learn how to help maximize the Open Enrollment experience for employees.
• Searching for the Silver Bullet: Leading-Edge Solutions for Leveraging an Aging Workforce
  Learn from several case studies how companies are addressing the challenges of an aging workforce.

To access additional studies from MetLife, visit Resources and Tools.