Values-Based Benefits: Rethinking One of Your Organization’s Largest Investments
Every dollar an organization spends on employee benefits tells a story about what it values, whether leadership has planned it that way or not. Christian organizations must weigh how one of their largest investments enacts their values.
Recently, HR Ministry Solutions invited me to lead a seminar for executive and HR leaders from Christian organizations around the country. We had talked about healthcare before, so this time I wanted to approach the subject differently. Rather than simply discussing rising costs, plan design, or the mechanics of healthcare, I began thinking about a more fundamental question: What do our employee benefits say about what we value?
That question led us at Sonvio into a larger conversation about what we have begun calling “Values-Based Benefits.”
“A benefits program never stays silent about what an organization values. It either tells that story on purpose or tells it by accident.”
What do Your Benefits say about what you Value?
Most organizations can articulate their values. We put them on our websites, discuss them during onboarding, include them in strategic plans, and hopefully use them to guide important decisions. In Christian organizations, those values often include stewardship, generosity, compassion, family, service, and care for people.
But values are communicated by more than what an organization says. They are also communicated through what an organization does, particularly through the ways it invests its resources.
That became especially clear during the seminar when I asked participants to share how much their organizations spend annually on employee benefits. Twelve organizations responded. Together, they represented more than $5 million in annual benefits spending.
I was struck by the number.
Here were just twelve organizations investing more than $5 million every year in caring for their employees. Expand that across churches, schools, ministries, nonprofits, and other mission-driven organizations, and the amount of money being invested is enormous.
Yet I wonder how often we think about that investment primarily as an expense to manage rather than an opportunity to express who we are.
At Sonvio, we have begun defining benefits as a tangible expression of how an organization chooses to care for its people and steward its resources.
That definition changes the conversation.
Where Do Your Stated Values Actually Show Up?
Healthcare, retirement contributions, paid time off, family benefits, disability coverage, professional development, and flexibility are certainly part of an employee’s compensation. But collectively, they are also an ongoing experience employees have with their organization. Month after month and year after year, those experiences communicate something about what really matters.
On family: An organization may say that it values family. But what does an employee with a spouse and three children experience when enrolling in healthcare coverage?
On stewardship: An organization may identify stewardship as a core value, but does that value influence how leaders evaluate a benefits program that has automatically renewed for years?
On generosity: An organization may value generosity, but where would an employee experience that generosity in the organization’s policies and practices?
These questions don’t have one right answer. Two organizations can share the same value and express it very differently. A gap also doesn't necessarily mean someone made a poor decision. Benefits programs evolve over time. Costs increase, employee needs change, vendors change, and yesterday’s best solution may not be tomorrow’s.
The more important issue is intentionality.
What Could $5 Million in Opportunity Look Like?
When those twelve organizations reported more than $5 million in benefits spending, I didn’t just see $5 million in expense. I saw $5 million in opportunity.
Imagine if those dollars could accomplish more than providing benefits, if they could care well for employees, reflect what the organization truly values, strengthen its culture, steward resources wisely, and create greater momentum for the mission.
That is the idea at the heart of Values-Based Benefits.
Five million dollars can quietly renew year after year. Or it can become one of the clearest expressions an organization ever makes of what it believes about its people.
It doesn’t begin with the question, What insurance plan should we buy? It begins further upstream by asking what we believe about our people, what we value as an organization, and whether the benefits our employees experience are consistent with those convictions.
There is much more to explore in answering those questions, and our conversation with HR Ministry Solutions only reinforced for me how important that work may be. The leaders on that call represented different organizations, different employees, different budgets, and different approaches to benefits. But collectively, they were stewarding millions of dollars and making decisions that affect the lives of thousands of people and their families.
That deserves more than an annual renewal conversation.
Every organization is already communicating something through its benefits. Every healthcare contribution, PTO policy, retirement match, and employee support decision tells part of a story about what matters.
The question for leaders is whether that story matches the one we intend to tell.
If your employees knew nothing about your stated organizational values and could only look at the benefits you provide, what would they conclude you value?
That may be one of the most important benefits questions we can ask.
Key Takeaways
Benefits communicate organizational values through what employees actually experience, not just what’s written in a mission statement.
Values-Based Benefits reframes benefits spending as an expression of stewardship and mission, not only a cost to manage.
Intentionality, not perfection, is the standard: gaps between stated values and employee experience don’t mean past decisions were wrong, but they’re worth examining.
The central question for leaders: if employees could only judge your values by your benefits, what would they conclude?
See how your organization’s benefits reflect your values?
We’ve built a free, three-minute Values-Based Benefits Assessment to help your team spot the gaps between what you say you value and what your employees actually experience. Take the assessment, and we will send you a free report with your results.
