Persona Analysis Can Help Tribal-Owned Businesses Understand Their Workforce Populations, Pinpoint Benefits Needs & Control Costs

The era of “one-size-fits-all” benefits plans is over. For the first time in history, many Tribal-owned businesses now have as many as five generations in their workforce. Most workers view employee benefits as an essential part of their compensation, but the types of benefits they want – and need – vary widely depending on age, income, family composition and life stage.

Workforce demographics can change from year to year. For example, is your average worker age changing as a result of hiring recent graduates, or is your organization hiring more experienced workers for open positions? Your risks change and so do the needs of your plan participants. Make sure you can quantify the change and proactively address the needs of your evolving workforce.

In order to understand the segments within your employee population, consider a HUB Persona Analysis. You’ll be able to go beyond anecdotal information to get real data and insights, which will enable you to tailor your benefits that will maximize employee satisfaction and enhance your competitive position.

Data is a driving force. Use it.

Persona analysis is a smarter way to create a benefits strategy and meeting employees where they are in life. If your organization isn’t taking steps to understand your population using persona analysis, it should. Persona analysis will give you a multi-dimensional understanding of your employees, including:

• Key personas within your workforce.
• Benefit gaps that put your employees at risk.
• Recommendations on how to align benefits, communication and wellness strategies to have the greatest and most meaningful impact.
• Insights into what is driving your costs, your turnover and how attractive your benefits offering is to recruit potential employees while retaining current ones.

In addition, you will get answers to key questions you may have, such as:

• Which segments of my employee population are financially fragile?
• How do my hourly workers’ benefit needs differ from my salaried workers?
• What benefits will accelerate recruitment and retention?
• How do career pathing and setting reasonable onboarding expectations change the overall health of my team?

Seeing benefits from multiple 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.

So why can’t this approach also advance your employee relationships? It can for Tribal-owned organizations that stop to take the pulse of their workforce and apply what they learn to guide how to engage one another and nurture healthy employee cultures. These actions ultimately improve job performance, boost impacts from leadership and reduce employee churn.

It’s worth studying your workforce

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 the different stages of 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.

Different demographics, different needs and shared goals

Experiential data — like pulse surveys or focus groups — are fluid. Snapshot demographic data, such as age, gender and tenure, is also useful. Once this snapshot data 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, like 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 go 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.

The many ways to 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.

These days, you don’t have to have the computing power of Google, Apple or Facebook to put your data to good use and design an experience tailored to your varied and distinct needs. Benefits can address concerns and keep people with you – and engaged – over time. Understanding your persona report is a critical part of the equation. A happy employee will help drive more sales of widgets and your organization as the employer of choice. Knowing who they are and what makes them happy 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 and management.