State of Employee Benefits™ 2021 | Large Employer Edition
Benefitfocus State of Employee Benefits™ report aggregates and analyzes data from the our platform, providing unique insight into employee benefit trends based on actual decisions.
Trends and Insights Following a Year of Disruption
Benefitfocus is pleased to present the State of Employee Benefits™ 2021 report – the latest of our original series established in 2016. This year’s report has been expanded to include four years of employee benefit plan design and participation, highlighting key trends that are shaping the future.
If we look back just a couple of years, the employee benefits scene was slightly different than what we’re seeing today. The lowest unemployment rate since the 1960s, rising health care costs and an increasingly diverse workforce left employers to perform a balancing act between controlling costs and offering competitive benefits packages.
Fast forward three years to an unprecedented global pandemic, and the plot has twisted.
While employers are still concerned with mitigating costs, their focus has shifted to uncertainty. The potential of layoffs, furloughs and budget cuts loomed as they responded to the financial impact of COVID-19. On top of that, many employers were forced to conduct a fully virtual benefits enrollment process for the first time ever. So how, and to what extent, did this impact benefit plan offerings and employee enrollment decisions?To answer this question, we looked to the data collected on our platform from the last four fall annual enrollment periods. We analyzed records from more than 3.5 million employees across nearly 350 large employers (1,000+ employees) from the last four years.
Read the State of Employee Benefits Guide for the complete story!