Benefits and Employee Productivity: Trends and Themes

While some business owners or managers may think of themes like employee benefits and health insurance as only holding value to employees themselves, in reality this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are actually several ways that quality benefits directly lead to happier, more productive employees, and this is a vital area to be aware of if you own a business.

At Nielsen Benefits Group, we’re here to help businesses with a huge variety of health insurance and benefits programs, from compliance and HR services to benefits administration, strategic assessments, benefit culture and more. What are some of the key ways that offering quality, proactive benefits across your company will improve the productivity of your staff? This two-part blog series will go over several.

benefits employee productivity trends

Benefits Over Salary

The first area we’ll look at here is a trend, one that’s been growing significantly over recent years: More and more members of the workforce have begun to prioritize quality benefits over salary when looking for a job. A study from Glassdoor found that as many as 70% of workers would prefer better benefits over a pay raise, and this is especially true among millennials (78%).

What does this mean for you as a business owner or manager? Simply put, if you want to attract top talent – and keep the talent you have – offering quality benefits is more important than ever. The most in-demand workers now know that they can find a job that pays them a similar salary to what they’re making now, but with better benefits; so if you want to stay competitive, you need to make sure your benefits are up to par.

Happy Employees Are More Productive

Great benefits are enormously valuable to many people, and will raise their spirits in a way that will positively impact their work. A study from the Harvard Business Review found that happy employees are, on average, 12% more productive than unhappy employees; and while you can’t make every employee happy all the time, offering quality benefits is one way to give them a stronger foundation of happiness to work from.

This is because benefits directly impact an employee’s quality of life, and can make a huge difference in how they feel both at and outside of work. For example, let’s say an employee is worried about their health insurance coverage; even if they’re doing their best to focus on work, that worry is going to be looming in the back of their mind and impacting their concentration. However, if they know that they have quality health insurance that will cover them in case of an emergency, they can feel much more relaxed and focused while they’re working.

In part two of our series, we’ll go over some other ways that strong benefits directly play into productivity among your staff. For more on this, or to learn about any of our employee health and other benefit services, speak to the team at Nielsen Benefits Group today.