The Hillman Group has always held a strong belief that benefits are a crucial component in both recruiting and retaining high-quality talent. Compensation and paid time off are no longer enough to attract and retain employees. Our team leverages this knowledge by focusing our benefit offerings on employee feedback.
Communication is something we work on every day. We have experimented with text messages, emails, notification screens, handouts and mailings. Ultimately, there is nothing quite as effective as taking the time to equip our managers across the organization with a functional understanding of benefits. We don’t ask them to be experts, but work to provide them with enough information to help their employees know when they can handle things on their own and when they should reach out to the benefits team.
We have a very multifaceted population, with team members from all over the world. This has allowed us to soar to new heights, but it can sometimes pose challenges for the benefits team. When creating benefits for a global workforce, it is important to take into account employees’ financial needs and cultural values. By doing so, we’ve created a strong base of medical, dental and vision plans, while leveraging point solution providers like Hinge Health and Lyra to deliver targeted enhancements to different groups. Our point solutions offerings tend to be very popular and sought after.
Our approach has been to get beyond just numbers. Of course, we measure things like participation rates and offering engagement, but success is measured most meaningfully by the impact on employee quality of life. Ultimately, we use a combination of engagement statistics, sentiment surveys and direct feedback to measure true success. If we see strong utilization for a new offering, but don’t hear anyone talking about it, we worry it may become a flash in the pan.
Our relationship with Employers Health has been a big part of our efforts to shift to a strategic benefits approach. It can be very easy to fall into a reactive mindset when you are overwhelmed with employee challenges. Employers Health helps us stay proactive so we can better plan and adjust our approach to offer our employees the best solutions to meet emerging challenges.
Benefits can be a whirlwind at times and knowing what trends to keep an eye on can be challenging. We have developed very strong relationships with our Fidelity Benefits Consulting team, as well as CVS and Employers Health. Together, they help our team make the most of our time when tracking trends.
One of the most formative books I have read is “The HP Way” by David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard (HP). It highlighted how easy it is to become insulated from the realities that our employees face. Finding ways to stay in touch with as many employees and managers as possible throughout your organization is critical to understanding the problems that benefits could solve or aggravate. What helped build HP also fuels our benefits success at The Hillman Group: the practical, people-focused approach of management by walking around to see the first-hand impact our benefits have on our population.