Consultor℠
Consultor℠ is a system that identifies improvements to your benefits package that will deliver greater value to your employees at a lower cost to you.
Overview
Consultor℠ is a service provided by IPR that offers a systematic approach to determining what current and prospective employees want in their compensation and benefits packages. Consultor℠ is not designed to make the recommendation that a company increase its spending on employee benefits because employees want more. Quite the contrary. A key goal of Consultor℠ is to identify benefit changes that are less costly to the company and more valuable to employees: in short, to find win-wins.
In the ideal world, employees want it all - but with product prices low and often declining, compensation cost control is necessary for survival. Compromise is required, especially in highly competitive industries. But the labor market is tight – and attracting and retaining talent is also necessary for survival.
IPR’s Consultor℠ addresses this problem by adapting a reliable technique used to determine customer needs and preferences. In some ways, Consultor℠ is an expansion of the cafeteria-style benefit selection process. The core to this approach extends this "shopping" process in two ways.
First, non-health and welfare benefits are added to the menu of choices. Additions might include various options for fitness programs, child care and elder care programs, alternative education and training opportunities, etc. Most companies maintain a laundry list of new benefits that employees have requested through different channels: employee focus groups, e mails, exit interviews, suggestion boxes, new hire orientations, rejection letters or phone calls, etc. Consultor℠ is a disciplined means of determining the value employees place on these new (and existing) benefits.
Second, Consultor℠ augments the traditional cafeteria process by explicitly making it a "market" research effort. The purpose of Consultor℠ is not to have employees actually change their benefits package, but instead to provide the company with information about their preferences. Consequently, only a small subset the workforce is surveyed. These employees are clearly told that they have been selected to help the company more systematically understand their preferences. A key component of this process is the managing of employee expectations.
Surveyed employees are told that their input is needed to help make educated decisions about some very tough benefit trade-off issues with large cost implications. During the survey process, the employees are shown the broader range of benefit options under alternative cost experiments. IPR has developed a technique that infers the value which employees place on various benefit options by observing how they respond to different sets of cafeteria-like cost constraints.
This "value" information obtained from the surveyed employees is useful to finance and HR planners. It provides a database that can be used for cost-benefit analysis of changes to the current compensation/benefits package. For example, a company has determined that a fitness program for employees would be added and that four alternatives with different costs are under consideration. The Consultor℠ database would estimate the values employees place on the different fitness program alternatives and indicate the one with the highest payoff (i.e., value relative to cost). The database would also be helpful in more difficult employee situations. Consider a company-mandated cut in costs that might be required when company revenue drops. Layoffs or "voluntary redundancy" programs may be required. A company could work with the survey data to design the voluntary redundancy packages that are more likely to be accepted by targeted employees, but rejected by the employees the company wants to retain.
