They Can’t Appreciate What They Don’t Know: Communicating Benefit Costs With Your Team

When Benefits Costs Rise, Leadership Means Communicating, Not Absorbing It Alone.

Open enrollment is the time of year for both employers and employees to strategize on their expenses from the prior year.

Is it going to cost more?

How will I afford these changes?

As an employer, we are faced with either assuming the price increase or passing it on and sharing it with our team. If we share it, they perceive that we don’t care about them. If we don’t share it, we face lower profits leading to other issues like no raises, bonuses, or other ways to further recognize them. And again, we don’t care about them.

Either way, we are the bad guys.

If we don’t share the price increase with them but don’t give raises, we suffer the consequences.

If we do share it, we do the same.

Ever heard the phrase, “No good deed goes unpunished”?

What do to? Communicate.

Bring your team into the conversation. Share with them how much the price increase is for the company, and have a meeting with them individually and tell them if you WERE to pass it on to them how much LESS they would make if you had. For example, a common medical premium for one employee might be $500. If you get a price increase of 15% for that one medical benefit, that’s $900 per year. Next year, that’s another $900. Just for medical. If you have other benefits like dental, STD, or LTD, do the math on those too. Suddenly you are over $1000 per year and growing year to year because it compounds.

They can't appreciate what they don't know.

I see clients get these price increases every year. It’s the same reaction—blame the insurance companies (which is understandable & I have strategies for that in another blog), but they don’t take the time to stop and educate. Explain. Communicate. They resent. They get upset. They are busy, so they pay the increase and just move on. Then, when their employee asks for a raise a few months later, they blow up. “Don’t they know how much I give?” No—they don’t because it wasn’t properly communicated to them.

They can’t appreciate what they don’t know.

You can’t do a lot about the insurance hikes—apart from getting involved with who’s in office, understanding our healthcare industry better so you can advocate for change, etc.—those are things you CAN do, but that won’t do anything overnight, & people have been trying to solve that problem in the US for a long time.

What you CAN do now is communicate to help your business and your team. Bring them into the conversation and ask them if they owned the company, what would they do each year with benefits? What’s most important for them? Sometimes I see clients offering benefits that their team does not value, yet they continue to provide outdated perks that were once popular but are no longer relevant.

Toss them out!

Listen to your team.

Trust them to know what they need—and what they don’t.

Trust them to understand your position & how you will get through this together.

Teams work together and communicate to solve problems. You aren’t in this alone.



Communicate.