Greg Hatcher, founder of The Hatcher Agency in Little Rock, has built a nationwide reputation on helping companies provide the kinds of corporate benefit packages that help his clients attract and retain the best help available.
When it comes to his own employees, Hatcher practices what he preaches not only for the value of the perks themselves but for what they say about how the company values each individual employee.
“For us to get good employees and keep them, we feel like we need to offer a really good benefits package,” he said. “I feel like when I hire someone on, that they’re a member of the family. It’s another mouth to feed. It’s another person that I’m supposed to protect. If I were to go cheap and not have disability for them, and then they get cancer and they can’t ever work again, I don’t want to be the one having to tell them, ‘Hey, I’m sorry, we don’t have coverage for that.’”
Statistics show that employers who mirror Hatcher’s thinking are strategically better off when it comes to retaining the best help, even though it costs the company more money to do so. For decades, survey after survey has sung a familiar refrain: Workers gravitate to companies that invest in their health and well-being, and particularly coveted are those companies, such as The Hatcher Agency, that provide perks looking past an employee’s working life.
Greg Hatcher
“I wrote an article years ago called The Employee Security Triangle,” Hatcher said. “When I hire an employee, I put my hands in a triangle, and I say, ‘There’s only three things that can happen to you if you come to work for us. One is you stay healthy and you come to work; we’re going to give you a paycheck. The second is something could go wrong along the way and you get sick or have an accident. If that occurs, I’ve got you covered with disability coverage.’
“Not only do I have them covered with disability; I have them covered with bonus-up disability by which we bonus up their salary by the premium for the disability, and then we tax them, and we take the premium out after tax, which means that now, because they technically paid the premium, their disability benefit is tax free. The third is if they stay here until retirement, they’ll have a retirement plan that will take care of them and protect them. So when I ask them to join the company, join the family, that’s how we protect them and take them to the finish line.”
Hatcher said the biggest trend he has seen in the evolution of corporate benefits, besides everything getting more expensive, has been the employees’ demand for flexibility, be it the rise of health savings accounts or wanting more specialty coverage than was once available.
“I would say the biggest change is that more people are on health savings accounts today than they were before. More people are opting for single versus paying it for the full family because Mom gets it one place; Dad gets it another,” he said. “There’s also a lot more things covered. Ten years ago, we didn’t have GLP-1s. Ten years ago, if you had substance abuse or alcohol abuse or mental health issues and you had to go to a hospital for 30, 60, 90 days, you only had three to seven days’ worth of coverage. Now you have whatever you need.
“Ten years ago, you might be on a blood thinner because you had heart arrhythmia. Today, you have an ablation. You have stents now instead of open heart surgery. People are getting hip replacements and knee replacements and having active lifestyles. People with rheumatoid arthritis might have had fingers that were all curled up. Now they live an active lifestyle with the medications. So a lot of differences have come, especially with medications, and with that, the cost goes up, so employers and employees both are paying a little bit more for that.”
All companies have to weigh costs when considering a benefits package, but statistics show that overall, companies are offering benefits that are in line with what employees say they value most. According to a Forbes Advisor survey, employees’ top five desired benefits include employer-covered healthcare (67 percent), life insurance (45 percent), pension/retirement plans (34 percent), mandatory paid time off (31 percent) and mental health assistance (23 percent).
That same survey found the top benefits provided by employers matched the employee list in 4 out of 5 items, though not necessarily in the same order of preference. The exception was mandatory paid time off, which 31 percent of employees cite as most important to them while employers did not rate it among their top five benefits provided, replaced by employee discounts.
That alignment suggests employers by and large understand the value of employee benefits and are investing their money in the right categories accordingly. However, benefits wish lists are not static things, and alongside those foundational categories come perks that reflect the times. Forbes Advisor’s list of most-desired fringe benefits among employees include flexible hours (51 percent), work-from-home options (37 percent), professional development (20 percent) and observing a four-day workweek (19 percent).
Other benefits that were deemed important, if outside the top five, could be described as related to culture. An employer respecting workers’ work-life balance, building trust through open and honest two-way communication, and taking steps to build team camaraderie were mentioned as important by employees and employers alike.
Why all this matters is because of the consistently strong pull that benefits have on employees and the equally strong compunction for workers to leave for greener compensation and benefits pastures. The Forbes Advisor survey found 32 percent of employees said they would quit in pursuit of higher pay, 26 percent would bolt for better benefits, and 22 percent would leave for better advancement.
Twenty percent also reported they would leave seeking the aforementioned flexible work-from-home perk, but data is mixed on that. Forbes Advisor reported the desire for remote work cuts sharply along age demographics, and fewer than half of workers across the board preferred to work purely outside the office. However, other sources report remote work on a hybrid model as most preferable to about 55 percent of job seekers.
Companies that cannot offer remote work arrangements due to the nature of the business, such as construction, often find themselves leaning into other elements to lure and retain employees. Little Rock-based Lexicon has proven itself a master of this, having grown into one of the nation’s most successful steel fabrication and erection companies and making headlines for its forward-thinking employee benefits.
The most recent company headline came in January, when the firm became an employee-owned company through implementation of an employee stock ownership plan. Over the past five years, Lexicon made news for rolling out its Strong as Steel: Building Mental Might mental health initiative and, before that, opened its own health and wellness clinic serving employees and their families.
Vice President of Human Resources Kassi Bissell said behind those newsworthy moves are a solid list of practical benefits options, which the company curates regularly to ensure it is offering things employees value and use.
Kassi Bissell
“Our broker runs a number of surveys, and our company director of benefits and shared services listens to the feedback over the course of a year and logs that,” she said. “When we’re looking at the different plans each year, we have that feedback collected from employees. We can see if this benefit wasn’t quite enough for this situation, or maybe we need to expand here or we’re not utilizing this one so much, so let’s take what we’re spending there and put it where our employees need it. We look at that every year.”
Bissell said the company also seeks to serve the widest range of needs by offering different options within benefits categories. She said equally important to what is offered in the plans is the help that is made available to employees to choose the right option for their situations.
“I think we offer a really good portfolio of resources to help employees choose the right plans for their family and their needs,” she said. “For example, Lexicon offers three medical options, from a really premium package to options at a lower cost. We’ve also chosen brokers that have great customer support for our employees when they’re deciding on their medical and dental options because it can get tricky trying to figure out what’s best for you and your family.”
Bissell said regardless of what they can afford to provide, one thing companies should pay attention to when offering benefits to workers is to communicate what is available and provide someone who can answer questions. She said it is also imperative to educate employees about their total compensation
“That’s a hot topic right now,” she said. “Just the other day, we had an employee who was making a salary, and he was going to leave for lower hourly pay to get overtime. We sat him down and took the time to talk about total compensation. He really was blown away. Once he looked at all the numbers, he saw the value, so keeping that total comp in front of people is really important because, unfortunately, in this industry, as competitive as the labor market is now, employees will see a dollar more an hour down the street, and they’ll go without even thinking it through.”
Bissell said taking such an interest in an employee often goes further than what is in the pay envelope or come open enrollment season. She said while not every company can offer an ESOP, a formal Strong as Steel program for mental health or reward 20-year employees with a $10,000 bonus the way Lexicon does, there are plenty of things they can do on a smaller scale. Gestures of employee appreciation, formal career mapping, continuing education and training, and even mobilizing workers to support nonprofits and charitable causes in the community are all low-cost ways for companies to invest in their workers and strengthen company culture.
“Employees don’t just jump for a few dollars, usually,” Bissell said. “We’re not ignorant that compensation is important, but we also make sure we have leadership development programs and wellness initiatives. Part of Strong As Steel is we have a communication platform, kind of an internal Facebook page, where employees are sharing, ‘This is how I made it through this struggle,’ or ‘This is what I do to relieve stress.’ When we really just stop and share experiences and show care for one another, to me, that’s why people stay.”
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