Page 265 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

252B RE-ENGAGE

other words, employee benefits were important intermittently, but not
on an ongoing basis.
To be sure, employee benefits are, and always will be, an impor-
tant component of an overall compensation and benefits package. If
an employer is too far “below market” in terms of available overall
benefits and “workforce-friendly” services, there might be negative
repercussions in the employer’s ability to recruit and retain employees.
But until recently, there has not been much discussion about whether
employee benefits—both the benefits themselves and the perception
of how competitive they are in the marketplace—actually have an im-
pact on employee engagement.
As we mentioned in Chapter 3, employee benefits were important,
showing some relationship to overall employee engagement when we
began these studies in 2004, but were no better than middle of the
pack when it came to explaining the variance of employee engage-
ment scores between winning and nonwinning Best-Places-to-Work
employers.
That was then, and this is now.
The more recent data are quite clear; 2 of the 10 survey items
that best predicted overall employee engagement scores are the two
employee benefits statements included in the Best-Places-to-Work
survey:

“My benefits meet my (and my family’s) needs well.”
“We have benefits not typically available at other organizations.”

The differences on these items between winning companies and
nonwinners are graphically represented in Figure 9.1.
We are not, by the way, the only researchers to come to this con-
clusion. A study carried out by Hewitt Associates determined that
“highly engaged employees experience better health and overall well-
being.” As Hewitt’s Neil Crawford noted:

The 115,000 employees surveyed as part of the 2009 study clearly
revealed that high engagement goes hand in hand with better