Business owners continue to grapple with the seismic shifts in the job market. They know workers are willing to jump from job to job, seeking higher compensation, better benefits and stronger support services. The pressure is on to understand exactly what matters most to their employees and how to provide a quality employee experience (QEX).
The era of “one-size-fits-all” is over. For Tribal-owned businesses, this is especially true as employee turnover continues to skyrocket and job satisfaction plummets. It’s time to create an experience your employees will value in the workplace – and beyond.
Let data and analytics be your guide before your next employee wonders, “Should I stay or should I go?”
More than just numbers
Having a QEX strategy provides a powerful new approach to designing and delivering benefits for Native Nation employees. Through data, you will be able to recognize that every dimension of an individual’s performance and health is interconnected. QEX identifies the key success metrics that influence a person’s ability to thrive, both at work and at home.
If your organization isn’t taking steps to know its population – or workforce persona – it should. By understanding your Tribal employees’ real priorities, you can develop a customized benefits plan that enhances your work environment and helps you stay ahead in the competition for talent.
An analysis of workforce personas is how marketing designs personalized experiences from multiple points of view. Seeing benefits from different perspectives can make your spend smarter, resulting in a return on investment 5% to 8% ahead of a one-size-fits-all approach. Marketers nearly unanimously say personalization also advances customer relationships.
Develop a strategy
Once key success metrics within your organization are identified, you can begin developing a comprehensive strategy to solve issues and prioritize needs.
This integrated approach for Tribal Nation businesses can address such issues as:
- Career & Growth. Enjoy daily job satisfaction and have a clear career path forward.
- Culture & Connection. Have meaningful interactions with others within the workplace and community.
- Health & Energy. Embrace physical and emotional health to enjoy life and complete daily activities.
- Money & Security. Feel financially prepared for the future and ensure the ability to manage life’s expenses.
- Productivity & Safety. Contribute to the workplace in a safe and productive environment.
- Communication & Engagement. Understand and engage in employer-offered benefits.
Meet employees where they are in life
Now more than ever, organizations want to provide meaningful benefits for employees as their needs change while optimizing their investment in benefits.
A qualitative and quantitative deep dive into your employee base will reveal telling insights into employees’ wants and needs, their financial health and myriad other factors, such as mental wellness. Data analytics are essential to providing personalized benefits that can include access to personal insurance, financial wellness tools and robust retirement options to enhance QEX. These benefits provide additional peace of mind for employees whose stress may be caused in part by financial insecurity.
In this new environment, a benefits program that delivers QEX can increase worker loyalty and make employers more attractive to job seekers.
Workforce personas and what they look like
Tribal employee groups that share characteristics, experiences and behaviors can be personas worth studying. Your new hires. The single parents. The new-to-management group. Study these personas by gathering information and asking, over time, their goals, motivations and pain points to understand their different stages in the employee lifecycle. It’s paramount for employers to better understand what their employees expect of them. This can be done during the normal course of business through such things as employee meetings, pulse surveys or special focus groups with interested employees.
Experiential data — like pulse surveys or focus groups — are fluid. Snapshot demographic data, such as age, gender and tenure, are also useful. Once this snapshot is gathered, applying analytics reveals even more about the commonalities and differences in your workforce. These are the basis of your employees’ personas — distinct groups with shared goals, motivations and needs.
HR professionals may have all of this data at their disposal but seldom have the analytics to assist them in reading between the lines on how to better meet employee needs. By looking at demographic information, such as age, role, length of service and record of promotions, employers can visualize the shifts within the workforce and, more importantly, where it’s heading.
These persona analytics provide a much clearer view of the workforce and goes deeper than segmenting by generation. How employers engage each person and how they best absorb information are important; however, consider the following three types of hires and how their benefits needs are distinctly different:
- “Fresh Face” New Entrants. These 20- to 25-year-olds are new to your organization and, typically, the workforce too. Roughly 50% to 75% of them are still on their parents’ health plan and just starting to learn about benefits and how to engage. They don’t need medical benefits, don’t seek to understand deductibles and care more about pet insurance, invisible braces and their student loans than a Health Savings Account.
- Technical Hires. This group is typically 26 to 34 years old and more savvy about benefits. They are embarking on their second or third job and have learned to engage in the medical benefits conversation. They are also marrying and starting new families with a different expectation of what’s important in a benefits portfolio.
- Late-Stage Hires. At the other end of the new-hire spectrum are employees who are 50 and older. They could be empty nesters who put a high value on benefits, with disability and retirement topping the medical options. They are typically very highly engaged and expect benefits to be seamless and easy to use. They want benefits that work – and that work for them.
Analyze your population’s personas
Looking into each part of your Tribal population helps you see the different paths on each employee’s journey. How can you make benefits a personalized experience? How can you use analytics to guide the decisions that matter the most to your employees? What will have the most impact on engagement, productivity and retention? How does the collective of thousands of individualized positive experiences impact your business?
We don’t see data. We see people. The data allows us to see where people live, what they spend on rent and benefits and whether they have access to fresh foods or live in a food desert. Understanding who is financially fragile or faces food insecurity gives us new priorities to solve.
Benefits can address concerns and keep people with you – and engaged – over time. Understanding your persona report is a critical part of the equation. Happy employees are productive employees; knowing who they are and what makes them tick is that first step.
HUB International’s employee benefit specialists consult with employers of all sizes and in all industries on every aspect of employee benefits program planning, designing and managing.