Our recent webinar, “Maximizing Employee Benefits Utilization: Strategies for Success,” covered key topics that stay top-of-mind for HR leaders. In a constantly evolving benefits landscape—and amid changing conditions like tightening budgets and generational shifts in the workforce:

• How can you ensure that your benefits are the right fit for your employees?
• Once you land the right-fit benefits, how do you ensure that your employees make the most of them?
• And finally, how do you measure success and apply what you’ve learned to keep improving your benefits?

TC Riley, Cariloop’s Senior Director of Data, Analytics and Research, explored these questions with the help of two insightful HR leaders: Jennifer Szymanski, Benefits and Operations Manager at Hylant, a leading insurance, employee benefits and risk management consulting firm; and Shannon Olson, Human Resources Supervisor at Goodheart-Willcox, a pioneering career and technical education publishing company.

We’ll start by answering the first question with an assertion: your benefits should align with your company culture. The ways that can look are as unique as your company.

Example: One of our partners shapes their decisions in the benefits landscape around the core value of “supporting each other and balancing our lives.” By using that value as a lens, they’ve taken an important first step toward ensuring that employees can understand and get the full value of their benefits.

To help guide your journey toward aligning your company culture and benefits, we’ll share how that process looked at Hylant, Goodheart-Willcox, and here at Cariloop.

Caring for Whole Families at Hylant

“Family is an important core value for us. When Hylant was founded in 1935, our founder made a promise to treat clients and employees like family with honesty, respect and trust. We continue to remain family-owned, and it’s important for us to let our employees know that ‘we have your back, no matter what.’

We’re a multi-generational company with over 1,000 employees at various stages of life. Our average age is around 46, which means we have a lot of employees in the ‘sandwich generation’ caring for both children and parents simultaneously. It’s really hard to fit all of that responsibility into the 24 hours in a day and still work your full-time job. The other brand value that comes into play for us here is empathy. That means we understand the challenges that our employees are facing, and we provide a solution to help ease that burden—showing our people that we’re walking with them and supporting them along the way.

A solution like Cariloop helps us reach the majority of our employees and allow them to share their benefits with other family members. It further supports our mission and our brand values to not only support each employee, but their entire family as well.” – Jennifer Szymanski, Benefits and Operations Manager at Hylant

Supporting Well-being and Individuality at Goodheart-Willcox

“One of our core values is ‘always improving,’ so we make sure that our benefits are always improving as much as possible. There are always different vendors offering new and exciting things, and benefits options are constantly changing. So we just try to make sure that, if employees are utilizing a benefit, it’s helping them in a meaningful way.

We strive to offer a tailored benefits program that values employee well-being and individuality at every stage of life. For us, that starts with reviewing our benefits offerings annually, which is more than just going out to market for medical, dental and vision. It’s about evaluating if we’re offering competitive benefits and if there’s anything that’s changed in the market, since trends change all the time. Priorities shift, especially as new generations start to enter the workforce.

We try not to base our benefits decisions just on how high utilization is going to be on day one. Because for us, the most meaningful benefits for our employees have not been the ones that are needed right away. They’re ones that become useful later in life. For that reason and so many others, offering Cariloop was a no-brainer.” – Shannon Olson, Human Resources Supervisor at Goodheart-Willcox

Setting the Standard for Caring for Each Other at Cariloop

At Cariloop, our culture permeates how we interact with each other and the world. Ultimately, we believe the way we care for others should be a reflection of the way we care for our team. We prioritize caring deeply for our Loopers so they can focus on caring deeply for caregivers and their families, our communities, and each other. 

Our goal is to foster an environment where every Looper feels respected, connected, included, and valued. We want to ensure that the benefits we provide are tailored to our Loopers’ needs and preferences. Their voices matter and we’re committed to consistently enhancing their experience here at Cariloop! 

That is why we provide our Loopers with the opportunity to give us feedback on our current benefits and how we can improve them. We then consider this information when we are exploring benefit offerings for the new year plans.

Learn how to maximize utilization of the benefits you select in our next blog post, and catch the full webinar recording here.