Elevate company culture by focusing on the employee experience

With more than a decade’s worth of experience in C-suite positions at brokerages, Ed Ligonde, partner and market director at Nava Benefits, is committed to elevating the employee and employer benefits experience. He spoke with us about how to use benefits to market your organization and how working with Nava can help you navigate the trickiest parts of benefits administration.

Benefits support people through the toughest times of their lives. Often, they make things a bit easier even in the best of times: Think of your last wellness visit to a family doctor or a preventive care assessment. Elevating the employee experience might seem like a lofty goal, but it’s well within the reach of small to midsize companies. In fact, you probably already have all the elements you need — they just take a back seat to more pressing business concerns.

Ligonde described his role and primary objective at Nava: helping companies become employers of choice. That’s not great only for your employees, but it's also great for your organization as a whole.

“Benefits are your marketing tool”

As an employer, you’re in constant competition to attract the best and brightest. You probably want your company's culture to be one that lets the best and brightest thrive — otherwise, they might head to a competitor.

You’re not alone if the term benefits brings to mind one word: insurance. That’s a dry, cold, boring term for something that actually encompasses much more. An easy-to-access and easy-to-understand healthcare plan is part of an elevated employee experience. It’s part of what draws your employees to you. It’s what makes your team members want to stay.

Ligonde encourages companies to see the opportunity that benefits provide to get their ideal candidates to choose them.

Yes, your free-bagel Fridays are great, too, but benefits that are easy to access and easy to understand can support your employees in all aspects of their lives. That’s a long-lasting, memorable advantage — not just a carbohydrate high.

“As employers, your benefits are your marketing tool; your culture is your marketing tool," Ligonde said. “It's how you brand yourself, you know, externally as well as internally from a people perspective. ... One of my passions is helping partners — understanding the culture and helping it — making sure that it resonates through their benefit campaign.”

A great broker is an extension of your HR team

Chances are that you don’t have a chief cultural officer (CCO) in your C-suite — but you probably know that culture can make or break a company. At its most basic, having a great culture means cohesion, or a shared commitment to meeting the company’s goals. It also means people come to work with enthusiasm every day.

Free-bagel Fridays might be a great start, but you can lose those gains if you have a benefits package that employees don’t understand or find hard to access. Here’s the rub: Free-bagel Fridays are pretty easy to implement, but your benefits may be more complicated — especially when you want to maximize their appeal.

That’s where working with a partner like Nava can help. As Ligonde explained, Nava has a team of the best and brightest of its own — a team that helps companies every day with their unique needs.

“Ultimately, because this is such a people business, and because this business is so comprehensive, it's impossible to be the expert in all particular arenas," Ligonde said.

"Fortunately, we have a lot of different skill sets at Nava," he continued. “If an employer is ready for a different funding strategy, there are three or four people at Nava who would be the best people to help lead that charge. If they're exiting a PEO, there are a couple of people over here that are really good candidates to help that client through a transition like that due to their experience and their ability to help those clients navigate those situations.”

It’s important to think of your broker as an extension of your HR team. They are there to help make things easier so HR isn’t overstretched — and doesn’t have to become an expert on everything they’re managing. Great brokers come with a range of expertise, a team of specialists, that HR can rely on based on their unique company needs.

Ligonde noted that Nava also brings its expertise to each individual client so Nava's team can help each company elevate its employee experience: “You want to make sure you have the right person that can understand the intricacies that that particular industry set requires. ... A lot of times, what we're doing is helping an employer understand what their competitors are doing, too.” 

Your broker shouldn’t let renewals sneak up on you

Benefits are part of your marketing and retention strategy, and they can be key to your company's culture. But how do you get the best benefits package at the best cost?

That’s something else the right partner can help with.

Ligonde noted that most companies don’t think about benefits until 45 days before their renewal deadline. By then, they’ve become trapped in a renew-or-lose scenario: “They're probably feeling very painted into a corner, like, 'OK, well, now I only have 45 days before my renewal or my effective date, and I've got all these other projects going on. I'm just going to bite the bullet and pay more for the same level of coverage and deal with the aftermath.'"

“That's frustrating," Ligonde continued, "because … you're having to pay more for no better benefit, for the exact same benefit you had today. It's like if you go into Starbucks and you get a coffee, and it's $3.50 today, and then when you walk in tomorrow, it's $5.”

Ligonde's strategy is to start the process earlier, letting companies know about all of the available options — not just that last-minute deal.

You, too, can find your way out of the last-minute panic, explore all of the benefits options for your team, and promote your company's culture to the best and brightest. Chat with a Nava expert today to discover how.

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