Employers looking to be competitive in today’s labor market may find that traditional benefits and work cultures just don’t cut it anymore.
MetLife’s 19th annual
“The pandemic has shown that not everyone was financially secure and not everyone had the right benefit offerings in place,” says Missy Plohr-Memming, senior vice president of Group Benefits at MetLife. “People are really taking a hard look at what benefits they need to be comfortable and know that they have the right protection.”
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MetLife’s study found that increased paid leave, insurance benefits for retirees and flexible workdays were especially in demand, with nearly 80% of employees showing interest in these benefits. Employee Benefit News spoke to Plohr-Memming to get an expanded look into why these benefits will be vital throughout 2022, not only to employees’ well-being, but also to companies’ ability to compete in the ongoing war for talent.
Why is increased paid leave so crucial in today’s workforce?
Our study shows that one of the reasons employees want increased paid leave is to account for those “what-ifs” in their life. What if they have a family member who gets sick, and they need to take time off for that? What if they have their own mental health situation and need to take time off for that? Some more cutting-edge paid time off would be taking a sabbatical and backpacking across Europe for two weeks. People really want to be able to utilize time in a way that is meaningful to their situation, and paid time off can allow them to do that.
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There is also more demand for retiree insurance benefits. Why are we seeing these gain more attention?
If you go back 30 or 40 years, there were a lot more retiree benefits than there are today. Generally speaking, many employers offered a pension plan, which guaranteed income for life. If you retired from your employer, you also usually got retiree medical coverage, retiree dental coverage and retiree life insurance benefits. But over the last 30 years, pension plans have become less and less common.
Imagine you work for a company and you've got nine or 10 benefits available to you as an active employee. Then all of a sudden you retire and those benefits are no longer available to you. You've got to figure out how to supplement those in some way. While there is usually a small burial type benefit offered as a retiree life insurance benefit, retirees are now asking for more. On a voluntary basis, they want the option to be able to have more medical, dental, and life insurance selections upon retirement. There is a real value for employers who are able to offer these benefits as well, because in today's job market, many employers may want to bring their retirees back to work on a project or part-time basis. So continuing to keep that connection with the retiree from a purely HR-strategy perspective may allow them to tap into a workforce that, up until today, they have not been able to tap into.
Looking back at the last 18 months, why is flexibility so important to employees?
As we hopefully come out of the pandemic and return to something more normal, employees know that they’ve been pretty successful [working remotely] for the last 18 or so months. That’s why they want to continue this flexibility. They want to be able to work a month from Hawaii or work a month from Florida. They just want to have some lifestyle choices — and paid time off along with flexibility works together to give employees just that.
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What other benefits are employees hoping to see next enrollment?
Employees still want traditional benefits, like medical, disability, dental and life insurance. But what our study found is that employees need their benefits to go above and beyond. They want nontraditional benefits like pet insurance, critical illness insurance and legal insurance.
But our study shows that what employees really want is the ability to create a portfolio of benefits that will serve their particular and unique circumstances. There are a lot of different and diverse people and generations in the workforce, so benefit offerings can no longer be a one-size-fits-all. Employees want the agency to build a life that is meaningful to them.
The employers who recognize that the world is different, identify the trends and try to go that extra mile to allow their employees to have access to these other voluntary benefits will be the employers who win this war for talent that we are all waging.
