2013 Survey Results: Employee Benefits Benchmark Survey
Posted March 04, 2014
Not all benchmarks are created equal, and over the coming year, the 2013 Employee Benefits Benchmark Survey may have greater significance than any that have come before it. That’s because it offers one final snapshot of employer-based benefits before the system was fundamentally altered by the Affordable Care Act.
While the fate of that legislation and the ways employers and the benefits insurance industry adapt to the coming changes remain unclear at the time of this writing, the 2013 Employee Benefits Benchmark Survey provides hints of things yet to come.
There appear to be a few clear trends at play. Health care insurance is a near-universal offering among employers. Other types of shared insurance benefits have declined slightly, while voluntary (employee-pay-all) offerings seem to have increased and diversified. Four out of five employers now offer defined contribution pension plans, compared to nearly one-fifth that offer defined benefit pension plans.
These trends seem to indicate that employers continue to use benefits as a tool to recruit and improve the lives of their employees, but that employers are handing off the active management of benefits to employees themselves, delegating the decisions and risk that comes with determining their future.
The 2013 Employee Benefits Benchmark Survey was conducted in late 2013 and was available to individuals through their client portal website. A total of 1,313 respondents completed the survey.
