It was just fourteen days before the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona when sprinter Michael Johnson contracted food poisoning. The favorite to win gold in the 200-meter race started losing both weight and energy. Johnson struggled in the semifinal and missed the main event by 0.16 seconds.
Johnson knows that setbacks can later become triumphs for those who maintain a healthy perspective. “Pressure is nothing more than the shadow of great opportunity,” he said.
Four years later, Johnson was ready to return to the summer games. This time in Atlanta, he ran the 400-meter race with a new record time of 43.49 seconds. Three days later, he set the world 200-meter record at 19.32 seconds. No other male athlete had previously won both events.
Today’s HR leaders and other corporate executives can learn from Johnson’s example as they face supply chain issues, rising costs, political unrest and other events that create stress and pressure for their employees.
While some respond to challenges with hiring slowdowns and workforce reductions, others see the opportunity to focus on the full employee experience, revamp benefits packages, address decreasing morale and cultivate the right culture.
Work benefits packages help employers attract and retain top employees. Now more than ever, those employees want to know that they are cared for, appreciated, valued and heard. Built In sat down with OwnBackup’s Shane Long to find out how the director of people operations and total rewards is building relevant perks and benefits packages that meet the moment.
OwnBackup’s SaaS data protection platform provides backup and recovery solutions for organizations worldwide.
How do you make sure that you evolve your perks and benefits package to meet what employees need in the moment? (Ex: adding more mental health benefits as people navigate the pandemic, etc.)
It is important to treat our benefits and perks as an iterative offering. We do more than just review our benefits and perks during our annual renewal. We constantly monitor societal shifts that may impact our employee’s wellbeing and plan new offerings around our findings.
We constantly monitor societal shifts that may impact our employee’s wellbeing and plan new offerings around our findings.”
We benchmark our benefits on a semi-regular basis to ensure that we are staying up to date on industry trends and make sure we are offering a competitive benefits package.
While benchmarking and industry trends are important, it is just as important to understand the demographics of our workforce and what may benefit different groups at different points in time. For example, we just enhanced our parental leave benefit after understanding much of our workforce is at the age where they may be planning a family.
We want to hear from our employees. We foster a culture of open communication, so we always welcome employee feedback about our current offerings. We also collect feedback through an annual engagement survey and a quarterly NPS survey.
What benefits have you pulled back on over the last year or so? What have you doubled up on?
We have not pulled back any benefits this past year, but we did lean into our supplemental benefit offerings during our recent open enrollment. We received feedback from employees about offering more unique benefits. We listened to their input and took action by rolling out identity theft protection, pet insurance, a legal plan, hospital indemnity insurance, critical illness insurance and accident insurance. We had about half of our eligible employees participate in these plans, which according to industry benchmarks, is well over the expected participation rates for new supplemental plans.
What role does employee feedback play in making sure you're putting together a relevant perks and benefits package that meets employees’ needs?
Industry benchmarks are only as good as the impact that benefits offerings will have on your employee base. If you just focus on what other employers in your space are doing, you may miss out on the most important benchmark of employee needs. Employee feedback is of utmost importance when evaluating the impact of existing and potential benefit offerings. That is why we survey our employees on a regular and ad-hoc basis. For example, we offer a free shuttle service for employees living in NYC, and we started receiving feedback about the location of the shuttle stops and departure times. We recently updated our shuttle schedule to make sure it was making employee commutes easier as intended. We also just updated our free lunch offerings in the office, and we are surveying employees every week to ensure that our options satisfy our employees’ appetites and varying dietary needs.
