In this issue:

• SHOCKING NEWS: The Average amount Employers spend on Benefits
• Emoticons: Your Brain no longer knows the Difference
• Why an Exit Survey is more beneficial than Exit Interviews
• Did You Know?

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The Average Amount Employers Spend on
Employee Benefits May Shock You

As the “Open-Enrollment Season” approaches, we’re often asked to track, or benchmark, what individuals spend on their benefit packages.  However, the answers to these benchmarks are based on a handful of factors. Such as, industry, workforce size, overall health of internal employees, and more.

According to Jeff Griffin, “…the average cost of employee benefits for employers per employee was $35.87 per hour. Of that amount, compensation accounted for an average of $24.49 with benefits accounting for the remaining $11.38” (Griffin, page 2). The amount employers spend on each benefits varies. However, it typically includes 4 types of coverage. Including health, life, short-term and long-term disability.

Civilian (Public Sector)

The average employer-paid portions of all insurance types is $3.14. This is per hour, per employee. For example:

• Education + Health Services: $4.19/hour/employee

• Colleges + Universities: $5.90/hour/employee

• Sales + “Related” Professionals: $1.52/hour/employee

Private Sector

The sector pays the smallest share at $2.70/hour, per employee. Some points of interest include:

• Service Industry: $1.10/hour/employee

• Management + Professional + “Related”: $5.28/hour/employee

• Goods Producers: $3.74/hour/employee

State and Local Government Workers

It may not come to a surprise that state and local governments spend more than the public and private sectors.  The average employer-paid portion, per employee, of all insurance types is $5.82.

• Government-funded Education + Health Services: $6.07/hour/employee

• Government-funded Colleges + Universities: $6.42/hour/employee

• Hospitals: $5.10/hour/employee

Your benefits package doesn’t need to be subjected to bench-marking. Therefore, you can avoid this subjection by providing your employees with extensive information within health insurance, voluntary benefits, and any additional benefits your business may offer.

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Emoticons: Your brain no longer knows the difference

Emoticons are the combinations of symbols available on your keyboard, like letters and punctuation marks. Studies have shown that when individuals view smiley faces (like emojis), along with real faces (humans) and ‘symbol-like’ faces (emoticons), the brain automatically associates them with one another. However, the way emoticons are presented changes how the brain perceives them. For example, the smiley face — : ) or : -) — automatically triggers the brain’s emotional scales by knowing the person is happy or smiling. Therefore, when the brain sees this variation (-: it (very correctly) dismisses it as a bunch of random punctuation marks.

Statistically, over 60 million people use some type of emoji everyday. Are you one of them? As technology advances, have you found yourself using these symbols more frequently?

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Why You Should Have an Exit Survey
instead of an Exit Interview

Individuals leaving their job are in a position to express their employee experience. Therefore, they can identify the company’s strengths and opportunities, but most importantly, share the reasoning behind why they’re leaving. However, many organizations gather this insight by asking questions in a one-on-one exit interview; which is not always the most effective method. But why?

Due to several limitations, exit interviews make it difficult to turn feedback into organizational improvements. Instead, these ‘exit situations’ should include “the 3-C’s of Effective Exit Date”. These include, candor, consistency and comparability.

Candor

Candor can be defined as the quality of being open and honest. When an employee is face-to-face with a superior during an exit interview, they tend to hold back their true opinions about their experience. By incorporating an exit survey instead, employees feel a sense of psychological safety to answer freely.

Consistency

Typically, exit interviews rely on an HR rep to facilitate each session. However, these sessions tend to vary in tone, questions, dedication of time, and note quantity. This leads to inconsistent data; which would not be the case with exit surveys. Exit surveys allow you to privately provide the same experience and questions for each parting employee, with little to no involvement from HR.

Comparability

Defined, comparability is the fact or quality of being similar and able to be compared. During an exit interview, data collected remains difficult to analyze and trend.  Data should be quantitative and qualitative across departments, supervisors, individual demographics, etc. Therefore, an analysis of the areas of high turnover can be conducted, and an improvement of the organization can be made.

At the completion of an exit survey, it is then up to the company to act on the improvements of the workplace environment. When an employee leaves, don’t miss out on the opportunity of having them express their experience. Instead, honor their time by asking and acting on their feedback.

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