Additional employee benefits: how to choose for your team

An employee benefit starts to make sense when someone can use it without asking for three explanations. Before expanding your benefits package, review what your team needs and how easily people can use what they already have.

For a company, offering additional benefits involves a budget, administration and communication. Choosing well means considering all three together. A long list in a sales presentation says little about what someone will experience on an ordinary Tuesday.

Listen to experiences as well as preferences

A survey asking “Would you like more benefits?” is unlikely to help you decide. Try questions that bring the conversation closer to daily life: which benefits each person knows about, which they have tried to use and where they encountered a problem.

You can include an open question about what would make the program easier to use. Avoid requesting medical information or personal data you do not need for this decision. Participation should help shape the benefit, without becoming an assessment of the employee.

Then check whether responses differ across workplaces, shifts or working arrangements. Office staff may receive every email; someone spending the day in a branch may depend on a poster or a brief explanation at the start of a shift.

Separate the service from the promise

When comparing corporate benefits proposals, ask for each element to be described in verifiable terms. Instead of accepting “holistic wellbeing,” ask what a person can do, through which channel and under what conditions.

• Telemedicine: request the current scope, access instructions and the situations that require in-person care.
• Discounts: review merchants, locations, purchasing channels and redemption terms that are useful to the team.
• Support: confirm where questions are handled and how problems are followed up.
• Communication: find out which materials are provided and who is responsible for distributing them internally.

This comparison also helps clarify what is not included. A word such as “health” can refer to very different services; a clear proposal names them specifically.

Test the experience before announcing it

Ask for a demonstration from a participant’s perspective. Start with the welcome message, continue through sign-in and finish with a concrete action, such as finding the terms of a discount.

Try it on a phone with someone unfamiliar with the platform. Observe where they pause and what they ask. If they need help finding the first step, resolve that before inviting the whole team.

Record the administrative steps too: who supplies the list of people, how additions and removals are processed and who resolves discrepancies. These less visible details can take up time if left until later.

Calculate the investment for a defined population

Request comparable proposals for the same number of people and the same scope. Review the total amount, taxes, additional charges and the terms for updating the covered population. A per-person equivalent helps with comparisons as long as you know how it was calculated.

At BENNOM, the published scenarios include the same benefits, while the investment varies with the number of people covered. You can review pricing for different team sizes and request a proposal for your population.

Keep the decision to expand benefits separate from reviewing applicable employment obligations. A platform’s contracted scope should be clear in its own right, without presenting it as a universal solution to the company’s responsibilities.

Decide how you will know whether it is working

Before launch, agree on what you will observe: awareness, access, questions, usage experiences and difficulties. You do not need to turn every interaction into a metric. Choose information that leads to a decision.

For example, if many questions concern registration, you can improve the instructions. If the catalog has few relevant options for a location, discuss that with the provider. If no one remembers receiving the invitation, communication needs attention before you conclude that people are uninterested.

Your choice takes shape when you can explain the benefit briefly, administer it clearly and understand how your team experiences it. The next step is to prepare internal communication that supports the launch.