Employee Benefits Strategies

STRATEGIC BENEFITS PLANNING

Given the cost of benefits and the reasons for offering them, an organization must plan the benefits program carefully.

Employers are driven by not one but two primary goals when it comes to benefits planning: employee retention and cost control. Balancing these competing and often conflicting interests is one of the primary challenges facing employers today.

Benefit planning processes have both strategic and tactical aspects.

To plan strategically, your organization must:

• collect data
• design a benefits program
• ensure cost control measures are taken and
• develop efficient administrative policies

In strategic planning, you begin by collecting information that's pertinent to the plan from inside and outside the organization.

In the next section, we'll start by looking outside the organization at federal employment law, which dictates mandatory minimum benefits that employers must provide.