The hospitality sector has seen a significant rebound. In fact, the sector employed approximately 16 million people in the U.S. alone during 2024. Yet, despite the growth, the industry continues to face challenges with labor shortages. Around 83 percent of hospitality businesses report difficulties in finding skilled workers.
To draw people into these essential roles, it's clear that new strategies are needed. Instead of sticking to the usual, one-size-fits-all benefits like health insurance, hospitality organizations may want to consider perks that cater to individual needs. These personalized benefits can include options like voluntary benefits, personal lines, trust or will preparation, fertility and family-forming services and support for adult caregiving.
Employers can strengthen their talent retention and attract new hires by leveraging data to understand what employees truly need. By identifying the best voluntary benefits that fit these needs, they can create a more personalized and appealing work environment. It's all about executing these strategies at every level to enhance the overall employee experience. This approach not only helps in retaining current employees but also positions the organization positively with prospective hires.
Here are the four components.
- A workforce persona analysis will reveal strategies. A persona analysis grows your understanding of your personnel and where they are at in life and work. It’s not enough to know the workplace is heavily represented by millennials and generation xers who entrenched with college debt. A thorough study of the personas adds layers of employee insights. Caregivers, financially fragile and single parents each have unique needs and varied levels of engagement and expectations of benefits.
- Benchmark the right way. When it comes to employee benefits, benchmarking should be more than a measure of how yours stands up against the competition or similarly sized employers. Or is it about identifying a gap in other offerings that you can exploit as a competitive advantage? Companies focused on benchmarks (demographic, geographic, by industry, etc.) don’t see opportunities or gaps to leverage. If some of your people spend a disproportionate percentage of their pay on rent or live in food deserts, you have different concerns than if the group resides in a low-cost area but are close to retirement. The financial, stress and health implications can be varied as the benchmarks. The company that addresses it holds an advantage.
- Gain perspective on options by analyzing benefits usage. The opportunities are open-ended. Claims trends can help reveal areas of financial waste (by employees and the plan), flag areas to fix through audit and education. Analyzing claims by person often shows gaps in major medical coverage that hospital indemnity and accident coverages address.
- Micro target your benefits communications. How different generations prefer to engage with media is too cute by half, but finding ways to deliver content to different people in different ways should be the emphasis. Keeping your messaging short, sweet and visual while eliminating what doesn’t apply to that employee is crucial for engagement. Workforce personas reveal what really counts to each person. Show the veteran employee what separates the company from its competitors, highlight for the mid-career hire how you support them into the next phase of life and tell the 20-something about debt, rent and pet services and confirm that the education on other benefits will be there when they are primed to learn. By emphasizing value of benefits, curing pain points and using a paucity of words and time, you strengthen bonds and build company trust.
This isn't science fiction—employers can really use their benefits data to create better strategies. The insights they gain have a lot of power to shape meaningful benefits packages and build strong work relationships, especially in tough-to-hire-and-retain sectors. Those in hospitality may find exploring this further to be another way to strengthen their business.
About the author: Jeff Faber is the chief strategy officer for global insurance brokerage HUB International’s Employee Benefits Practice. He is responsible for the development and execution of cutting edge cost-containment, risk-reduction and employment-enhancing initiatives. He leverages data into information and information into action to help clients realize their objectives and find new frontiers. Prior to joining HUB, Mr. Faber worked with Assurance Agency, Lockton Companies, KPMG and PwC where he led large service teams in all areas of compensation and benefits. He has spent the last 10 years exclusively helping clients manage their employee benefits expenses and company transactions.
This article was originally published in the June edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.