Brokers: Make Your Clients’ Turnover Problems Your Problem

Written by:
David Moser
November 11, 2021

The Great Resignation poses tremendous challenges to employers, spurring an intense focus on how to retain workers. If you’re an insurance broker, this historic moment offers new urgency to engage clients around untapped benefits.

You may be offering traditional packages to your clients, but now they need more. More ways to attract new workers (including part-timers). More ways to engage all of their existing workers. More ways to create a culture of care. 

Let’s start with understanding the seismic shift in labor dynamics and how this affects your clients.

The U.S. October Jobs Report beat expectations, showing that employment has roared back to pre-pandemic levels. The overall unemployment rate fell to 4.6%, with leisure and hospitality leading job creation.  

This is great news for the economy. But the labor supply remains weak, making hiring even more competitive. And keeping people at their jobs is also tougher than ever, with quit rates at an all-time high.

Pay close attention to how well your clients are attracting and retaining staff

If you’re an insurance broker who works with businesses, this may not seem like your problem. You’re a broker, not a hiring manager. 

But with business owners scrambling for ideas, brokers are uniquely positioned to help companies leverage benefits to attract employees. Why? Because studies show that competitive benefits packages play a huge role in attracting and retaining workers: 

  • Society for Human Resource Management: Companies that use benefits as a tool for recruiting and retaining talent reported better overall company performance and above-average effectiveness in recruitment and retention compared with companies that do not.
  • Glassdoor’s Employment Confidence Survey:  About 60% of people report that benefits and perks are a major factor in considering whether to accept a job offer, with 80% claiming that they would choose additional benefits over a pay raise.
  • LinkedIn survey: The benefits that employees care about the most are health insurance.
  • ADP survey: Sixty percent of employees named healthcare as the most important benefit they considered when deciding to accept their current job, far outpacing all other benefits. Among employees of companies with 20 to 49 employees, 74% indicate that health insurance would influence them to accept a role at a new company.

Also read: It’s The Great Resignation and Your Business is Cash-Strapped. Here’s How to Help Workers Stay.

But what about part-time workers who may not qualify for a company’s insurance plan? Or low-wage workers who can’t afford to participate?

Companies have a tough time attracting and retaining this population of workers. And the turnover rates are higher for these categories of workers. Indeed.com has identified a number of part-time and lower-wage jobs that experience particularly high turnover: 

  • Waiter
  • Fast food worker
  • Child care worker
  • Hotel housekeeper
  • Hotel receptionist
  • Retail sales associate 

And yet it is part-time and low-wage workers who can benefit the most from strong health coverage and other benefits – and who may feel greater loyalty and satisfaction towards the companies that offer good benefits.  

The benefits you’re probably overlooking are the ones your clients need most now 

Here’s what you need: a way to give your clients an affordable way to take care of high-turnover workers and address their staffing challenges.

It turns out that there’s a way to accomplish these goals… and in the process create a new line of business for yourself. Indeed, there’s a path to tap additional revenue from the customers you’ve had for years.  

For the worker populations who qualify, help employees enroll in Medicare and other public or low-cost benefits. Programs like Medicaid and CHIP were developed in part to reduce poverty, and yet they are vastly underused. You can do your clients and their workers a great service by facilitating enrollment into public benefits that were designed to support vulnerable populations.

For workers, public benefits either gives them access to benefits they didn’t have or reduces the costs to them and your client’s company. Low cost benefits for additional services like vision, dental, and telehealth supports employee health and well-being. They also help increase employee attraction and retention.

Also read: You Can Help Every Worker Feel Grateful for Good Health Insurance

Are you offering your clients benefits packages that include Medicaid enrollment and other benefits for part-time and low-wage workers? If not, consider adding to your revenue with commissions for a totally new stream of benefits that have likely never been offered to your clients. Help your clients understand how valuable these affordable packages can be to attracting and retaining high-turnover workers.

When you make your clients’ turnover problem your problem, you can partner with them in creating innovative solutions that benefit everyone.

Learn more about BeneStream’s suite of benefits packages