How Your Benefits Package Affects Whether Team Members Stay
Most organizations build their benefits package once and then leave it largely untouched. It gets renewed, adjusted for cost, or updated when a staff member asks for something specific. But rarely does it get assessed in a deliberate, strategic way.
That’s a problem. Research tells us that 43% of employees say their current benefits package has kept them in their current role. That’s not a small number. It means that nearly half of your team is, at least in part, staying because of what you’re offering them beyond a paycheck.
When benefits drift out of alignment with what your people actually need, the message it sends, even unintentionally, is that you stopped paying attention.
Why Benefits Drift and Why It Matters
Benefits drift happens gradually. A parental leave policy written five years ago may no longer reflect the makeup of your team. A wellness stipend that was generous at launch may now be inadequate against rising costs. A health plan that fit a younger staff may not serve a team that has expanded.
None of this happens because leaders don’t care. It happens because benefits assessment requires dedicated time, expertise, and a clear process. In most mission-driven organizations, those resources are stretched thin.
The cost of letting it drift is real. For mission-driven organizations in particular, where competing with larger private sector salaries is often not possible, benefits carry even more weight in the decision to stay. Investing strategically in benefits is far more cost-effective than losing team members and cycling through repeated hiring.
What a Strategic Benefits Assessment Actually Looks Like
A benefits assessment isn’t just a cost review. Done well, it’s a people-centered process that asks: are our benefits actually working for our team, and are they aligned with the culture we’re trying to build?
That process typically includes:
- Listening to your team. Before you look at what the market is doing, find out what your people actually need. Employee engagement surveys, stay interviews, and direct conversations with staff at different life stages are invaluable here. You can’t design benefits for an abstract workforce. You need to design them for the people who actually work there.
- Benchmarking against your sector and peer organizations. Understanding what comparable organizations are offering, and where you’re competitive or falling behind, gives you the context to make informed decisions, especially when resources are limited.
- Evaluating utilization. Benefits that aren’t being used are worth understanding. Low utilization sometimes signals poor communication, but it can also signal poor fit. If your team isn’t using a benefit, find out why before automatically renewing it.
- Aligning benefits to your values. If your organization is committed to equity, work-life balance, or staff wellbeing, your benefits package should reflect that commitment in concrete ways. Values that live only in your strategic plan and not in your HR systems are difficult to sustain.
- Building in a regular review cycle. A benefits assessment isn’t a one-time event. Building a rhythm of annual or biannual review ensures that your package evolves as your team does, rather than falling further out of alignment each year.
The Capacity Question: Who Owns This Work?
One of the most common challenges we see in mission-driven organizations is not a lack of intention around benefits. It’s a lack of dedicated ownership. Benefits strategy requires someone who understands your people, your budget, your sector, and the HR landscape well enough to translate all of that into a package that actually works.
For some organizations, that person exists internally: an HR leader, Chief People Officer, or operations lead with the expertise and bandwidth to own it. For others, particularly smaller nonprofits and growing small businesses, that capacity doesn’t exist in-house yet. In those cases, outsourcing this work to an HR Business Partner, someone who brings strategic HR expertise and can work alongside your team on an ongoing basis, is a practical and effective alternative.
Either way, the key word is ongoing. Benefits strategy isn’t a project with a start and end date. It’s a continuous responsibility that belongs in your people systems, not on someone’s back burner.
Benefits Are Part of the Daily Experience
Culture and recognition are powerful drivers of why people choose to stay, and they are. But benefits sit alongside those things as part of the daily experience of working somewhere. They communicate, in practical terms, whether an organization’s stated values translate into how it actually treats its people.
A team member going through a health challenge, welcoming a new child, or navigating financial stress doesn’t experience their benefits as a policy document. They experience them as a reflection of how much their organization cares about their life outside of work.
Getting that right takes intention, expertise, and consistency. But it’s one of the most powerful investments a mission-driven organization can make in the people who carry its work forward.
Sources
TriNet: The Impact of Employee Benefits on Recruitment and Retention
Selerix: How Benefits Affect Employee Retention
Cause Leadership: Employee Benefits Package for Your Charity or Nonprofit
Ready to Take a Closer Look?
If your benefits package hasn’t been assessed with intention in the last year or two, it may be time. BFM works with nonprofit, philanthropic, and mission-driven organizations to build people systems, including benefits strategy, that reflect their values and serve their teams.
Schedule a conversation with our team to talk through where you are and what’s possible.