The Evolving Benefits Landscape: July 2024 EN:Insights Forum

During the July EN:Insights Forum, members heard all about the results of SHRM’s 2024 Employee Benefits Survey from Daniel Stunes, SHRM’s manager of data monetization. The presentation focused on uncommon employer-provided benefits—from what they are to what they say about short- and long-term workplace trends.

“These less-common benefits might serve as a differentiator for businesses,” Stunes said. “If you provide them, they might better meet the needs of your employee base, or they could be something that helps with recruitment or retention, so that the business can either hire more quickly or need to replace employees less often.”

Much of the push for organizations to adjust their benefits offerings came as a result of the Great Resignation and the post-pandemic labor landscape. The resulting economic impacts have led to new regulations and changed employee priorities, influencing work culture and preferred employer-provided benefits. 

Here are five critical insights from the research.

Research Insight 1: Most organizations (97%) offer some form of health insurance as a benefit. Even though the overall share of employers offering wellness and lifestyle benefits dipped from a peak last year, there are many other benefits emerging as options for business to consider:

• Bariatric coverage for weight loss: 27%
• Menopause benefits (counseling and education): 17%
• Menstrual or menopause leave (beyond regular sick leave): 2%
• Gender-affirming hormone therapy: 12%
• Gender-affirming surgery: 11%
• Egg freezing for nonmedical reasons: 5%
• Reimburse domestic travel for medical care: 11%

“We’ve seen several organizations, such as Microsoft, step up and really push the trend of supporting more openness and recognizing the challenges many women face during menopause, and doing what they can to support,” Stunes said. “More organizations are taking notice, especially since the Department of Labor points out that women between 45 to 54 make up about 10% of the total civilian labor force.”

Research Insight 2: Between 32% and 40% of organizations offer paid leave for maternity, paternity, parental, and/or family care needs. Paid adoption leave and foster child leave remain less common but are becoming a more frequent option than they were just a few years ago. Options for cashing out  unused paid time off increased from last year.

• Leave payout program: 60%
• Leave cash-out program: 23%
• Adoption leave: 33%
• Foster child leave: 26%
• Unpaid time off to attend an activism event: 12%
• Paid time off to attend an activism event: 3%
• Paid mental-health-specific days (beyond regular sick leave): 16%
• Unpaid sabbatical leave: 8%
• Paid sabbatical leave: 6%

“Looking at various civic leaves, 28% of organizations offer paid time off for volunteering, 12% offer unpaid time off for attending an activism event, and 3% give employees paid time off to attend an activism event,” Stunes said. “These obviously have become bigger topics of discussion in the last several years, and we’ll continue to watch to see if there will be more changes happening with those options.”

Research Insight 3: When it comes to family care benefits, options for child care are among the least-common benefits offered. SHRM researchers found that since 2021, these benefit offerings have been cut in half from their previously already low rates. Similarly, elder care assistance remains an offering from very few organizations, despite the country’s aging workforce.

• Subsidized child care center: 3%
• Nonsubsidized child care (company-affiliated onsite/near-site): 2%
• Subsidy for elder or adult dependent care: 1%
• Elder care referral service: 13%
• Pet health insurance: 22%

“With an aging population, elder care is an area to keep an eye on,” Stunes said. “It hasn’t increased a lot over the last couple of years, but it might start hitting big here if people are becoming caregivers more and more often and need that kind of help.”

He added, “Years ago, I thought workplaces offering pet health insurance seemed odd, but I admit I was wrong. This is a benefit increasing in popularity, and it’s usually very cheap for companies to provide. It’s nowhere near as expensive as health insurance, and some organizations have said it can even be basically free if partnering with a pet health insurance provider.”                                

Research Insight 4: Flexible work was tremendously popular during the pandemic, but ever since the end of lockdown, organizations have been emphasizing RTO (return to the office), with some employers insisting on five days per week onsite. However, many workers and potential hires want to have at least the option of hybrid work, and a majority of organizations do offer that to most of their employees.

• Employers offering hybrid work opportunities: 63%
• Employers providing/subsidizing remote work expenses: 56%
• Flextime during core business hours: 53%
• Flextime outside of core business hours: 31%
• Compressed workweek: 27%
• 4-day workweek (32 hours or less): 8%

“With the four-day workweek, employees have a compressed workweek, working 32 hours instead of the full 40 hours,” Stunes said. “This is still a very uncommon benefit. Even with recent studies, mainly in the U.K., showing the success of the four-day week, it’s still a pretty low option here in the United States.”

Research Insight 5: In terms of education and development, professional memberships, certifications, recertifications, and professional licenses are not only commonplace, but in the case of professional licenses, may be legally required for a worker to have. These fees can be a direct cost to employees but directly benefit employers. Not surprisingly, the majority of organizations either pay or reimburse employees for these costs.

• Pay for professional memberships: 87%
• Pay for certification/recertification: 79%
• Pay for professional license application or renewal: 77%
• Offer executive or leadership coaching: 44%
• Offer formal mentoring programs: 24%
• Offer undergraduate or graduate tuition assistance: 46%
• Offer student loan repayment: 9%

Despite being offered by few organizations, “[s]tudent loan repayment benefits have been a hot topic recently,” Stunes said. “This is something that organizations might want to look into when it comes to recruiting people who recently completed school and have those high student loan bills to pay.”

Randy Clark: Modernizing and Future-Proofing Your Benefits

Randy Clark is senior vice president and CHRO for Sempra Infrastructure. He’s been with the company for more than 20 years, serving as chief administrative officer and CHRO for Sempra LNG, as well as CHRO and deputy general counsel for Sempra Energy, among other roles.  

One point Clark emphasized is the importance of effectively communicating about benefits with employees.

“You have to be ruthless in your prioritization,” he said. “While there might be somebody who really enjoys an option like a gym subsidy, if you’re not seeing a connection with your health care, maybe you cut it. And for some folks, that’s not going to be their favorite thing to cut. But you have to ruthlessly prioritize what’s working, what’s driving outcomes, what you hear employees appreciate, and then you have to stand back and say for the utilization of this benefit, it’s just too costly.”

Here are some excerpts from Clark’s Q&A during the July 2024 EN:Insights Forum.

How do you effectively measure the ROI of a benefits program for long-term impact?

We have a pretty robust benefits program, and we have a pretty robust engagement monitoring and feedback loop. The way we track ROI is a combination of employee engagement: How are we doing? What are we hearing back from our employees? Then we look at utilization: What kind of retention do you get? What kind of turnover are you seeing, and what are you hearing from your employees?

Going through the pandemic, we learned a lot, as I’m sure many employers did. We conducted various surveys that we wouldn’t have done nearly as frequently before the pandemic, and then decided what to do with that feedback. We were able to refine and customize a lot of our benefit offerings in ways that I think, had we not gone through the pandemic, we wouldn’t have had the luxury of that much data to track our return on investment.

How do Sempra’s benefits strategically align with the company’s overall business goals, such as talent acquisition?

One of our big strategic drivers around our employees is development. We feel it’s very important to develop our employees and have that track where you can move internally as well as pull talent from external resources. When you look at education reimbursement, we encourage and pay for that within the context of the tax code, but we also pay above and beyond, and we have to do that creatively.

In thinking about education expansively, that includes certifications, such as AI. If we’re paying to get you certified in a particular skill, that’s something we hope will work to retain you and make you feel like a valued employee.

It also aligns with our strategy of upskilling and making sure that our development features align with engagement and connecting with our employees. If that’s really very important around retention, we want to make sure that we’re delivering.

What emerging employee benefits can help companies build a more resilient, adaptable workforce for the future?

You have to know your workforce and understand what’s important to them. Maybe you’re giving them a benefit survey periodically or watching utilization to try and figure it out. Education on menopause is something that has shown up in a big way, and now our health plans cover leave-related pieces. When you talk about education, it’s not just education for women, it’s education for family members as well. It really is a transition, and the demographics of our workforce have definitely aged. So how do you provide tools that are helpful?

If you’re looking at a lot of the parental leave benefits, do you cover adoption? Do you cover foster care? Think about how people make families. It has evolved dramatically. You can evolve your practices to make sure that you’re folding all of that in. Maybe freezing eggs for something other than a medical reason isn’t something that you can bake into your plans, but recognize that families come about in lots of ways.

While you’re thinking from an emerging perspective, there are lots of employees that are having to cover benefits for both younger and older generations. Going back to some of the other types of coverage: If you offer backup child care, consider that a lot of people take care of elders. Instead of backup child care, maybe you can make it backup dependent care. It’s kind of the same benefit, but we’ve managed to negotiate with our vendors in ways where we’ve expanded the scope. You’re dealing with an older generation that you’re taking care of, or is it a younger generation that you’re taking care of? That is where we’ve really seen a lot of the evolution.

What innovative benefits programs can be used to retain high-performing employees and reduce turnover? 

If you really want to get that retention, you have to engage in an ongoing conversation, not necessarily a verbal conversation, but a conversation with your employee base. You have to track what’s going on and make sure that you’re responsive, but you also need to think about how you communicate. There’s a question in many engagement surveys that says something like, “I think something’s going to be done based on this survey.” If you don’t give a feedback loop to people that proves you’re listening to them and explain that you’re launching a new benefit offering because you’re listening to them, you don’t get the full kick of the retention.

The real value comes when you think about every benefit. Whether it’s existing or new, or you’re expanding an offering, it’s how you talk about it: How do you get it in front of your employees and make sure that they understand it’s there and how to use it? Also, realize that while every benefit may not be important to every single employee, they’re not looking for 100% of your benefit offerings to be relevant to them, but they want to feel enough connectivity.

Register for the next EN:Insights Forum.