An Education in Hyper-Personalized Benefits

As the people and culture leader here at OneDigital, I think that we’ve approached benefits in a different way.

We really think about the people of our company as customers, and not a captive audience in which we need to check a whole bunch of boxes to put together their benefit plans. We really look at the individuals at OneDigital. I think we do a great job at that, mainly because we’re trying to understand our people, as customers, and what their needs are. That’s going to help not only retain our talent but attract new talent as well.

We rely a lot on survey data and so, internally, we have done some great studies and surveys, and externally, we do that as well. Internally, there are a couple of ways that we help understand what those needs are, and we’re able to slice and dice that information in those different groups. You can’t just necessarily look at their age and know what their needs are. You also have to consider their life stages.

We do a benefit-specific survey, where we ask what is working, what’s not, and what they would love to see. And we’re able to understand what stage they are at in their life and professionally. And we pair that with engagement surveys we do three times a year that don’t necessarily focus on benefits. In addition to the usual questions, this engagement survey helps us measure stress, burnout, and team and leadership support with plenty of open-ended comments. Together, these surveys help us understand what our people value and where there may be a need that we can solve through our benefits strategy. We have found at OneDigital that if we focus on all of these different areas, it can help us craft and offer the tools and resources for total well-being. And when we do that, it reflects in people’s work and their engagement.

Along with providing some of these surveys to our clients, we are able to get some insights from our marketing team’s employee value perception study. One of the things that we have learned is that there is a pretty significant gap between the investment that a lot of companies make in benefits and what the perceived value of those benefits are by the employees. I think it’s important that companies understand how all these different things come into play.

We don’t think about benefits just from the perspective of healthcare, but all of the different aspects of well-being. At OneDigital we think about it in groups: The first one is physical, which includes health and your mental well-being. Then there is financial well-being, and then professional growth, and finally community and purpose. All of those different things really are important, and you have to think about the total package.

Over the past few years, one of the things that we’ve noticed—both in our engagement surveys and our benefit surveys—was the struggle that people have been having with mental health. And that’s not a new story, especially since the pandemic. But how we look at that and how it came out, especially in the engagement surveys, has changed some. What we saw from our workforce were responses around stress and burnout and those types of issues. And so last year, we made a large investment in providing greater mental-health benefits.

We previously offered the EAP [employee assistance program] benefits through our carrier, but our people told me that the cost and resources, as well as the response time, was not meeting their needs. So, we invested in a partnership with a top-tier mental health and coaching company that extends our benefits in this area to all employees and their dependents.

We also know that a large part of our workforce is part of the sandwich generation. It’s the people who are trying to take care of, and manage things for, their kids but are also trying to do things for other people in their family as well, namely their parents. With our population at OneDigital, the average age is around 42 years old and they’re right there in that sweet spot. And so, as we look at how to help our group, we’re looking at the next steps and planning to offer them help managing caregiving on both sides. We are discussing piloting new programs at the end of this year and the beginning of 2025. And there are some great companies out there that are doing work in the caregiving space.

If you think about what you’re trying to accomplish with the people in your organization, and the benefits that you offer, you have to understand them like customers. They are internal customers. And, so, I think the key is you have to dig a little bit deeper into what their values are. You need to parse the data into the different ways that you would when you’re thinking about a customer. Employees aren’t just one-dimensional.

So, for instance, you can’t just think of age as one piece. You also have to think about where they are in their life cycle, or what’s happening to them. And it’s not the same for everybody in each age group. I think that many benefit studies focus pretty narrowly on traditional benefits. We’ve really broadened our surveys over the past few years for internal purposes and for our clients as well. And there’s just some interesting, surprising pieces of information that you pull from that and can explore.

I think one of the more unexpected pieces that came out of our external surveys was in the financial well-being aspect. We asked people if they were confident or not in their finances and the structures that they have to support that, and where their worries might be. I would have thought that there would be more concern for individual contributors at a lower professional level. But what our data found was that executives have a high degree of stress around their financial well-being. So, we want to be able to do what we can to help mitigate those worries and those financial risks they are experiencing at their level. But we would never have known that without combining different demographics and being able to parse the data to say, this is what professional level they’re at, this is the age range, and this is what part of their life cycle they are in at the moment. When you look at all of those different pieces, it just provides some really interesting nuggets.

One of the services that we offer is financial advisory services, and we’ve really worked to help our people understand that it’s not simply for wealthy people to figure out how to invest their money. It is for someone who is thinking about renting versus buying, or who wants to know how to build a budget. It can help a lot of people position themselves to build more financial acumen. We have financial advisors who work with individuals, but also are regularly providing educational services on a broader basis to help people understand what kind of services they provide.

I have to be really careful, and I would suggest the same for other people leaders as well, to think about not just where you are today, but the growth pattern of your employee population. A lot of these vendors are not necessarily great at scaling. Our company happens to be a high-growth company, so we’re bringing on hundreds of new people every single year and acquiring new firms. So, when I evaluate a vendor, one of the things that I think about is, how will they be able to grow with us, and what are their capabilities for expansion? Also, being able to offer a high-touch service is important with some of these specialty services we put into place. For us, that’s part of our internal brand—our benefits have a very high-touch, personalized model—so it’s important for us to make sure that vendors we work with will provide that same kind of service.