In this guide, we will explore in-depth about employee benefits fairs, know how to plan them, and how Airmeet can help host virtual employee benefits fairs.
What Exactly is a Benefits Fair?
A benefits fair is an event held by an employer to inform employees about various types of benefits that they can gain, such as health insurance, 401(k), wellness programs, investment options, fitness membership, dental & vision coverage, and more. This is a major occasion in the HR calendar, which usually takes place once a year.
At the benefits fair, employees learn about the perks that are available to them and get an opportunity to speak directly with representatives from various benefits providers, allowing them to ask questions and clear doubts.
Advantages of Hosting an Employee Benefits Fairs
The host organization enjoys multiple advantages from an employee benefit fair. Let’s understand this in detail.
1. Attracts and Retains Top Talent
According to this report, the primary goals of benefits programs are to boost productivity (53%) and to attract and retain employees (49%), as per HR experts.
Candidates who are really interested in a job often look at the perks package. When top talent knows that your company is allowing employees to leverage various employee well-being initiatives such as life insurance, mental health support, and more, they are more likely to join your company.
These initiatives also aid in attracting top talent to the corporation. Employees nowadays often value benefits as much as their salary.
So when they see that a company offers a variety of benefits, such as retirement plans, wellness programs, paid vacation, professional development, and other perks, they are more likely to stay with the company and less likely to shop around for opportunities.
2. Build a Healthier Workplace
Offering numerous wellness benefits, such as gym memberships, yoga classes, and consulting sessions to employees directly supports the physical and mental health of employees, thereby creating a healthy workplace within the company.
Studies show that around 33% of professionals believe that having the option to work flexibly would boost their job satisfaction and morale, while nearly 30% think it would enhance their overall work productivity and efficiency.
Furthermore, providing perks that promote work-life balance, such as flexible work arrangements, remote work options, and ample paid time off, enables employees to balance their personal and professional lives, resulting in a healthier work environment.
3. Boosts Employee Morale and Job Satisfaction
When employers offer extra perks and compensation to their employees beyond their usual salary, they not only boost employee morale but also job satisfaction. Employees and their families feel secure when you cover benefits like life and critical illness insurance.
The current satisfaction rate among American workers with their employer-provided benefits stands at 54%.
Offering a robust benefits package enhances staff happiness, increases peace of mind, reduces mental stress, which ultimately boosts job satisfaction and loyalty.
4. Reduces Employee Turnover
Offering good employee benefits greatly reduces employee turnover rates in companies. 40% of employers think that their employees leave for jobs with better benefits elsewhere.
When you invest in employee well-being and offer a wide range of benefits packages, it shows your commitment and care for them, which helps reduce the employee turnover rate.
5. Increase Employee Engagement
When a company offers various benefits to employees, they feel satisfied, happy, healthy, and financially secure, which makes employees engaged.
By providing extensive perks packages, you make the workplace a desirable place to work, increasing their involvement naturally in all aspects of the business.
Employees actively and wholeheartedly participate in all the company’s programs, such as the wellness program, professional development activity, cultural celebration, and more.
6. Improves Employees’ Job Performance
Companies that offer various benefits to employees encourage them to focus on their work, which increases their work performance.
People actually feel cared for and secure when you offer them paid time off, like sick leave, parental leave, marriage leave, maternity leave, and hybrid & remote work options, flexible work arrangements, allowing them to balance their personal needs with work. This increases their engagement in their work, resulting in a greater job performance.
They take the work seriously and give their full effort to complete their day-to-day tasks, which results in good quality work.
7. Enhances Brand Image
When organizations offer comprehensive benefit packages to their employees, they experience a different level of happiness and satisfaction. Employees like these share positive stories about the company with their family, friends, and colleagues, highlighting how much it values its staff.
This positive word-of-mouth fosters a strong public image and helps build community, enhancing the company’s appeal to clients, investors, and prospective employees.
Employees share their experiences on social channels such as LinkedIn and review on platforms like Glassdoor, which increases the value of the company. In the business world, when professionals become aware of a company’s beneficial aspects, top talent is drawn to it and begins to seek employment there.
How to Plan an Employee Benefits Fair?
Planning a benefits fair needs a strategic approach as you don’t just want to educate employees about various benefits packages offered by you, but also to maximize employee engagement. A well-executed benefits fair serves as a platform for staff members to learn about and use all the benefits the employer offers. The following steps will help you plan an amazing employee benefits fair.
1. Know Your Employees’ Needs
Before designing any benefits package, understand what your employees’ specific needs are. Get to know their age, family status, family income, financial status, priorities, and more to offer them a benefit package that meets their needs.
For example, if employees have a strong interest in physical activity, you can offer them a gym membership. If employees want to invest in an insurance policy, you can offer them group health, life, or disability insurance plans at a reduced cost.
If an employee needs help with career advancement, you can offer training and development opportunities like workshops, online courses, and upskilling/reskilling programs.
2. Research Market Benchmarks
Employees may have certain expectations from benefits packages, so it is a great idea to conduct market research. Study the benefits packages that companies in your industry offer to their employees.
This research will help you understand what benefits are standard in your industry, what benefits your competitors are offering, and what employees truly value.
You actually ensure that your benefits package is competitive enough when you see market standards. By taking into account both external benchmarking and employee needs, you can create a benefits package that is both competitive in the market and highly valued by employees.
3. Select Vendors
Reach out to various vendors and know what benefits they offer, like health insurance, retirement plans, dental, vision, wellness programs, etc. Research potential vendors based on their reputation, scope of their offerings, and compliance with relevant regulations (such as ACA/ERISA). Don’t just accept the deal vendors offer; try to negotiate on pricing.
4. Choose an Event Venue, Date & Time
After selecting vendors, choose a venue with ample space to comfortably accommodate all the employees and vendors with their booths.
Ensure that the event venue has adequate parking and all public transportation options are available, such as metro, train, and bus. When choosing an event day, avoid weekends and major holidays.
Organize a benefits fair on a Weekday (e.g., Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) to maximize employee attendance. And schedule the event at an hour that suits you, but avoid late-night hours, as transportation options are limited.
5. Promote Your Event Internally
It’s time to inform all the employees about your upcoming benefits fair. Through internal communication platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, share details about the employee benefits program with all staff members.
Also, send meeting invitations to all the employees through personalized emails with all the necessary details such as date, time, location, agenda, and more.
6. Get Employee Feedback
This is a critical part of the employee benefits fair as it directly informs you whether the offered benefits packages were worthwhile and meet employee needs.
It also gives you an understanding of how the overall event went and what needs to be improved so that you can plan and execute the future fairs even better.
How Airmeet Can Help Host a Virtual Benefits Fair
Airmeet is an all-in-one virtual and hybrid event platform that focuses on creating a highly interactive experience in a virtual environment. The platform also provides a highly customizable and user-friendly experience.
Airmeet can easily accommodate 10,000 participants at a single event. It offers a wealth of networking features that create an experience of in-person networking, allowing participants to build genuine connections.
Let’s explore how Airmeet can help host an interactive and engaging virtual employee benefits fair:
1. Branding and Customization
Airmeet offers extensive branding and customization features to reinforce your brand identity at your virtual benefits fair. You can incorporate your brand logo, color, font, and theme into various rooms such as virtual lobbies, stages, breakout rooms, networking spaces, and reception areas to represent your brand image.
You can also include a welcome video at the start of the event to pique audience interest. You can change the background with solid colors, gradients, patterns, or upload your own background image to align with your brand’s visual identity.
These comprehensive branding and customization capabilities will make your employee benefits fair truly immersive and engaging.
2. Live HD Streaming Capabilities
Airmeet supports high-definition video for live events and conferences, allowing you to stream your virtual benefits fair in HD quality. We make sure that your corporate events are presented professionally so the audience will have a smooth and enjoyable viewing experience.
Speakers and audience will see each other in HD as well, and the presentation will be clear and crisp. Employees can easily read text on slides, see details in charts, and understand visuals. Plus, they can clearly see the speaker’s face, making it easier to communicate.
In short, the benefits fair will be much more engaging and professional thanks to Airmeet’s HD video support features.
3. Backstage Area
Airmeet provides a private backstage space, referred to as a green room, where the host, co-host, speaker, and presenter can gather before going live on the main stage.
Your speaker, host, HR representative, and benefits providers can gather in a backstage area and have a private chat in real-time, review presentation content, test the audio & video, familiarize themselves with platform features, and get themself fully prepared before facing the audience.
4. Interactive Tools
Interactive tools are vital to building an emotional connection between speakers and audiences. Attendees become more active and involved when they use it in a live online event. Keeping this in mind, Airmeet provides a range of interactive features such a real-time chat, poll, and Q&A.
Through chat, your employees can directly chat with benefits providers and HR representatives to get immediate answers to their specific questions about the plans and coverage they have offered.
Your speaker can take polls on different plans and get immediate feedback from employees so they know which benefits package is most preferred.
Q&A sessions will spark real-time conversation among benefits providers and employees. Suppose insurance provider representatives are offering their plans, so some common queries employees may have about it, like ‘How are premiums calculated?’, ‘What is covered & what is excluded?’ and such. By answering these questions, the benefit provider can resolve employees’ concerns right there.
Apart from that, Airmeet offers two more features that foster engagement, one is a “raise hand” and the one is “emoji reaction”. If employees have any queries or doubts, they can raise their hands and give a signal to the speaker without interrupting their speech. Using various emojis like thumbs up, heart, clapping hands, or more, employees can express their emotions in real-time.
5. Networking Features
Since Airmeet focuses heavily on networking, it offers a suite of networking features such as speed networking, social lounge, and fluid space, allowing your employees to form new connections in a virtual setting. Using speed networking, employees can connect with many like-minded people in a short amount of time and have one-on-one video chats with everyone.
Using the social lounge and table, employees can join a table and participate in spontaneous group conversations, and then move between different tables to meet other staff members. Employees can set up their own discussion tables and invite anyone they want to join them and have in-depth conversations about several benefit packages.
If you want to encourage group conversation, Airmeet’s expandable tables are a perfect option. It enables the setup of private round tables or discussion tables for up to 50 people. Every individual can expect an enhanced experience thanks to this activity’s high level of interactivity and charm.
6. Interactive Breakout Rooms
Airmeet offers breakout room features designed to allow participants to have group discussions in a virtual setting. This feature can enhance engagement in your virtual benefits fair. The host can create multiple breakout rooms and set up to a maximum of 30 participants per room. One special thing is that hosts and speakers can move freely around the breakout rooms to look over discussions and engage with various groups.
Your employees can have a topic-specific discussion. For example, employees can discuss investment options of the 401(k) plan or pension plans. They can prepare their questions to ask benefit providers.
With the help of our breakout room feature, you will be able to involve your employees, encourage engagement, and create a truly valuable experience for them.
7. Gamification
Airmeet offers highly engaging game-like features to bring fun and entertainment to your employee benefits fair, that are leaderboards, point systems, badges, and interactive challenges.
Through these gamification elements, you can hold friendly competitions between employees, create an exciting environment, and allow them to have fun in the virtual realm.
To double the employee engagement, you can form teams to play a game and offer attractive prizes to the winning team.
8. Mobile Event App Capabilities
With Airmeet’s mobile event app, your employees can join an employee benefits fair from a smartphone or tablet.
Thanks to its availability on both the App Store and Android, it’s easy for employees to attend the benefits fair, learn about the various benefits offered, and access the materials.
Whether employees are in the office, at a cafe, or working remotely, they are able to participate in the virtual benefit fair.
9. Data Analytics and Reporting
For virtual and hybrid benefits fair, Airmeet offers advanced analytics and reporting features that provide comprehensive insight into your event performance.
You can track various metrics that are crucial to benefit pair success, such as attendance, Q&A, poll, chat engagement, resource downloads, top sessions, networking activity, employee feedback responses, and more.
In addition, you can download various reports such as master report, Q&A report, chat report, longue report & speed networking report to assess the effectiveness of the online benefits fair.
10. Customer Assistance
Airmeet focuses on delivering a great customer experience, providing the support you need for the success of your event, such as technical support, chat support, and email support, all 24/7.
Our email support is always available to resolve any technical issues that may occur during the event. Suppose your speaker, presenter, or audience faces any technical issue during the live session, they can avail immediate resolution by contacting this email address [email protected].
Airmeet provides “AirCare Services” for more thorough assistance, which include event setup, stage management, in-event technical support, in-depth platform training, and hybrid event consultation. This comprehensive support allows you to focus more on content delivery and audience engagement.
Additionally, Airmeet offers a vast online knowledge base featuring articles, FAQs, and tutorial videos that cover a wide range of topics, including the organizer guide, attendee guide, speaker guide, and more, allowing event host, speaker and audience to familiarize with platform with ease, so they can have a seamless experience while using it.
Final Thoughts
Employee benefits are not just perks; they are strategic investments that contribute to building a culture of well-being, leading to a healthier, more engaged, and ultimately more successful army of employees.
Offering various benefits packages, employers not only retain top talent but also attract & recruit great talent to build a strong, productive, and loyal workforce that drives business success.
Following the steps shared here won’t only help you organize a phenomenal employee benefits event, but will also help employees appreciate and value the perks you offer. Whether you are a small firm or a large multinational corporation, with Airmeet, you can host a dynamic, interactive, engaging, and effective employee benefits fair, every single time.
FAQ
Healthcare because most employees consider it a valuable benefit offered by an employer. It includes life insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, critical Illness Insurance, etc.
