By Gabe Vanderjagt

It’s a best of times/worst of times environment for planning professionals and firms, and it will likely will remain so beyond 2025. Budgets are growing as every type of event — conventions, conferences and trade shows included — continue to recover from the pandemic. In-person events are in vogue again and 86.4% of organizers are jumping back on the bandwagon. It’s driving strong growth in the U.S. planning market overall, which is on track to hit $1,346.92 billion this year.

But underlying the growth in demand for events is a shortage of qualified, reliable professionals to do the work. Over 60% of event planners overall say the growing difficulty of finding, training and retaining staff stands to hold them back.

There is no single — or immediate — solution to the problem. But one way to help with long-term employment sustainability can be found within your employee benefits strategy, particularly with voluntary benefits that allow employers to create highly personalized offerings that meet current and prospective employees where they are.

These are critical differentiators for attracting and keeping top talent. What propels this strategy is the application of a data lens to employee groups, and how they view and access benefits. Given the explosion in both benefits products and vendors, benefits analytics offer the best clarity for honing in on which will best meet each employee’s individual needs.

Here are four critical components of a data-driven benefits program.

  1. Gaining valuable insights with persona analysis. An important starting point is using employee data as the basis for detailed profiles, or personas, of the various segments in the workforce.

    This goes further than typical generational segmentation. It’s a deeper dive into employee groups, asking specific questions, like how long employees have been working, generally and for your company, how they view and engage benefits, and what they expect from them.

    Looking into each part of your population helps you see the various paths on each individual employee’s journey. How does this layered perspective suggest different ways to make benefits a personalized experience for everyone?

    How can you use analytics to guide the decisions that matter the most to your employees? What will have the most impact on engagement, on productivity and on retention? How does the collective of thousands of individualized positive experiences impact your business?

    Persona analysis is a way to take the pulse of the workforce, then apply the learnings to guide better engagement and nurture healthy employee cultures. This better informs benefits design, improves job performance and reduces employee churn.
  2. Using benchmarking to uncover benefits opportunities and gaps. Most people think of benchmarking, when it comes to employee benefits, as a competitive thing: How well do your benefits stand up against the competition or even similarly sized employers, for example? But that is only part of the puzzle. You can benchmark based on U.S. population trends, on geography, on industries and on benefits offered, too.

    Benchmarking is a great way to identify opportunities and gaps in your offerings.

    Looking at your employee population against U.S. Census data for, New York City, for instance, you may find that a worrisome percentage of your workers there are spending a disproportionate percentage of their pay on rent, while many additionally live in food deserts. The implications of that — being financial stress and even physical health issues — can give you a direction for voluntary benefit offers.
  3. Applying analytics to benefits usage (or other data sets) to enrich your understanding of options. The opportunities are pretty open-ended.

    Looking at claims trends can help you identify areas of financial waste (by employees and you), flag areas where education is needed, such as in health care services, and also point to gaps in major medical coverage that voluntary benefits like hospital indemnity and accident insurance could address.
  4. Using analytics to improve your benefits communications. Everyone knows the generalities about different generations and how they prefer to engage. But doing the groundwork can help you better understand what’s working, what’s not and what could improve.

    The basics still apply. Keep your messaging short, sweet and visual, and use the right channels. But workforce personas will enable you to focus on what really counts. Take, for example, the new-to-the-workforce 20-something, with next to no experience with benefits, but who is primed to learn. By emphasizing the value of benefits and the pain points they address, such as aiding in managing college debt, you are forming the start of strong ties early in the individual’s occupational career.

The environment for employees and employers alike these days continues to be in flux. Strengthening the social contact between them has never been more important. A well-designed benefits strategy, highly personalized and informed by solid analytics, is one way to put them on solid ground.