The True Cost of Benefits: How Transparency and Communication Drive Employee Retention (Sponsored Content)

For Nicole Sanchez, HR Director at Bryan Properties, this year’s benefits enrollment season brought an unwelcome surprise that many regional employers are facing. Insurance costs jumped upward of 20% when policies renewed. 

“Historically it’s been much lower,” Sanchez explains. “Typically they do increase year over year, but this year there was a much larger increase than there has been in the past.”

The spike forced Bryan Properties to completely drop their longtime carrier and shop for alternatives, a process that could have easily resulted in employee dissatisfaction and potential turnover. Instead, Sanchez used the disruption as an opportunity to strengthen employee relationships through radical transparency and strategic communication.

“Anytime you change a benefit for an employee, it makes them uneasy,” Sanchez acknowledges. “They’re used to a certain way, a certain doctor or prescription plan or whatever it is. So anytime there are changes made that disrupt their daily life, their personal life, it causes them unease.”

“The initial employee reaction was predictable,” Sanchez explains. “There were concerns about doctor networks, prescription coverage, and the general inconvenience of learning new systems.” But rather than simply announcing the changes and hoping for the best, Sanchez took a different approach.

“I think that the biggest thing for us is communication,” she says. “Explaining to them why these changes are happening. We like to be fully transparent. Obviously, we want to maintain the best benefit to them while being cost effective for the company.”

This transparency paid dividends. “A lot of our long-term good employees were right on board with it, even though it was a change and disrupted their lives. They appreciated the up-frontness of us just telling them why we had to make these changes and it wasn’t just us trying to mess with their benefits for the sake of messing with their benefits.”

While Sanchez admits she hasn’t quantified the exact cost of employee turnover, she acknowledges the economics. “It is much harder to replace an employee than it is to retain an employee. Our goal is always retention,” Sanchez says.

The time investment alone is substantial. “The time that it takes you to put the job out and sort through all those applications and the interview process, all of that time is money,” she explains. This philosophy has resulted in notably higher retention rates at Bryan Properties, which Sanchez attributes to several key factors beyond just competitive health insurance coverage.

“Bryan does pay a pretty high portion of their health insurance, and that’s very, very nice,” Sanchez notes. But equally important are what she calls “the little things”, or benefits that don’t require massive budget increases but significantly impact employee satisfaction.

“We offer our employees a lot of flexibility in their time off, and we have a very generous PTO policy. We try and give them extra days off. We have extra holidays that we provide them, extra PTO time. So I really think that it’s the little things that you can offer them. When you can’t offer big expensive benefit packages, offering smaller, supplemental, extra time with their families and things like that is very important.”

For other employers facing similar insurance cost pressures, Sanchez offers several practical strategies:

Lead with transparency. “Explaining the why, giving them clarity and a little bit behind the curtain as to why these decisions have to be made” helps employees understand that changes aren’t arbitrary but necessary business decisions.

Engage employees in the process. “I think engaging your employees to see what benefits are valuable to them and what they use or don’t use and don’t like is very important, especially when trade-offs between different benefits become necessary.”

Shop regularly, not just during crises. Even when costs aren’t forcing your hand, Sanchez recommends periodically reviewing benefit options. “I do think it’s a best practice occasionally to shop those plans anyway, even if your cost doesn’t necessarily increase, just to make sure that you couldn’t be giving your employees more value for the same or similar amount of money.”

By approaching the insurance cost increase as an opportunity for better communication and employee engagement rather than simply an unwelcome expense, Sanchez and her team maintained their high retention rates while successfully managing costs.

“Our goal obviously is to give our employees the most we can with what we have,” she says. It’s a philosophy that acknowledges financial constraints while prioritizing the human element that drives business success.

This content is paid advertising by Bryan Properties.