Get details on how you can identify (and fill gaps) in disability and absence management from Deborah LaBonar, PhD, DMEC director of benchmarking and research. In addition to providing context for why benchmarking tools created by and for disability and absence management professionals are valuable, you’ll get details on how measuring something against a standard helps employers of all sizes and industries, and ways you can use different comparators for different business units within your organization!
Resources:
- Read the latest benchmarking column in the November/December 2024 issue of @Work magazine for additional insights and stay tuned for a new column series by Deborah LaBonar in 2025: https://dmec.org/work-magazine/answer-the-so-what-question-and-reach-the-c-suite/
- Learn about DMEC surveys and benchmarking reports: https://dmec.org/resources/surveys-and-benchmarking/
Transcript
Welcome to Absence Management Perspectives: A DMEC Podcast. The Disability Management Employer Coalition, or DMEC as we're known by most people, provides focused education, knowledge and networking opportunities for absence and disability management professionals. DMEC has become a leading voice in the industry and represents more than 20,000 professionals from organizations of all sizes across the United States and in Canada.
This podcast series focuses on industry perspectives and delves into issues that affect DMEC members and the community as a whole. We're thrilled to have you with us and hope you'll visit us at www.dmec.org to get a full picture of what we have to offer, from webinars and publications to conferences, certifications, and much more. Let's get started and meet the people behind the processes.
Heather Grimshaw: Hi, we're glad you're with us. I'm Heather Grimshaw with dmec and today we're talking about benchmarking and the inherent value to taking a data driven approach to integrated disability and absence management.
We'll be chatting with Deborah Labonar, PhD, DMEC's director of benchmarking and Research, who has agreed to answer a few questions and help listeners understand how benchmarking can answer that. So what question for disability and absence management professionals?
So I'd like to kick off our conversation by asking you to give us an elevator pitch overview of what DMEC means when we say the word benchmarking and why it's valuable for absence and disability management professionals.
Deborah LaBonar: Well, I have to admit that before I hopped on this call today, I went to the dictionary to look up the word benchmarking. I always like to know kind of what that formal definition is. Of course, I've been working in this space for over 20 years. But you know, how does the world define benchmarking? And you know, interestingly, it defines it as the act of measuring something against a standard. So I was thinking about that and how we use benchmarking in our industry. And yeah, we use it to measure a plan or a process or our outcomes against a standard, but we also use it to identify gaps. So you may not actually have something to compare against that standard. You may just need to look at the standard to know what you need to create, where you need to focus your resources to fill that gap. So I'd say that in our space we actually think of it a bit broader than that generalized definition of benchmarking, of measuring something against a standard. Because we may be comparing, I'd say nothing against a standard to see where those gaps may be.
Heather Grimshaw: First of all, I Love the fact that you looked it up in the data dictionary. I think that's certainly something that I usually do. It's like, what does this literally mean?
And then also the inclusion of the ability to identify gaps. I think that's really, it's really helpful. Thank you. So I'm hoping you'll give us a perspective on the importance of benchmarking tools that are designed by and for integrated disability and absence management professionals.
Deborah LaBonar: You know, there's a number of HR benefit types of surveys and benchmarking tools out there that an HR professional can access. So what makes a tools created by an IDAM professional different or unique? And really having these tools created and analyzed by the professionals in our space can help with that integrated disability piece. So if you think about just an HR survey that's looking at all different types of benefits, usually you're going to see the different benefit programs in a silo. So you might see how does your vacation measure up, how does your disability program measure up? But what an integrated disability absence management tool would do is focus on that integrated piece as well.
So, for example, talking about how your workers compensation program is running concurrently with your STD program, or we think about using FMLA approvals or STD approvals as a proxy for an FMLA approval and how organizations are going about doing this.
So getting back to that process, what is the process that you're using in your claims management and how your different programs interplay and not just looking at them in a silo?
Heather Grimshaw: That's helpful. I appreciate the examples there. I think there are a lot of folks who, when we say integrated disability and absence management, they're not sure what that means. So I think the example of the workers comp, the example of the short term disability or STD is really helpful.
So for someone who's just getting started, what are the first few steps they take to engage in the benchmarking process? DMEC has a series of benchmarking columns that walks folks through some of these processes that we published in At Work magazine.
And I'll include the link in the notes section of this episode. But Deborah, I'm hoping that you'll share with us. If you were chatting with a disability and absence management professional or colleague about the benefits of benchmarking, what would you recommend as those first few steps for someone to start investigating options?
Deborah LaBonar: Well, I've spent many years talking to employers about benchmarks, whether it's their program outcomes, whether they're at plan design. And one of the very first questions that I ask is where do you want to be on that spectrum?
So for some employers, it's really important to be cutting edge, to be leading the pack, so to speak, and offering some leave programs that perhaps others are not putting in place yet.
So they're really interested to be the ones that stand out because of their programs. Others are okay to be sort of middle of the road. You know, let's just make sure we're doing how most of our competitors are doing.
We don't want to do any less than that, but we don't really need to invest and do something more. So that's really the very first question is where do you want to fall in terms of comparing to other groups?
The second is who are your comparator groups? Right. There's so many different ways we can compare ourselves or organizations to others, and especially in the world that we live in now, where we may have employees all over the country, then you may be looking at more of a national comparator group.
Or if your organization is only in a particular region, a location type of comparison may be really important to you. Likewise, I like to ask ask, where do you pull your talent from?
So benefits, as we know, is very important for attraction and retention of your talent pool. And so when you're working with the folks in your HR teams who are looking to attract talent into the organization, where do they pull that talent from?
Is it important that they're from the same industry regardless of where that person sits, or is it going to be localized and regionalized? So if we think about hiring a lot of folks into a customer service organization, it may be less important what industry you're in, but more important about the type of role that you're pulling from and the location.
If you're in a particular metro area and you're trying to pull customer service agents from local talent pools, then you're going to be interested in comparing your benefit offerings to other benefit offerings of your competitors in the regional space or the local space in terms of that talent.
Less important, the industry. And I'd say the third thing that's really important to consider is employer size. If you're thinking of a really large organization that may have very robust and rich benefit plans because they're just that big versus a really small organization who really may need to pick the particular benefit package that they offer to their employees because of the financial piece of it, it may be really critical to you that you're comparing to groups of a similar employer size and less so about industry or region.
Once you've identified Your goals about where you want to be on that group. It's really important to think about who your comparator groups are. I once worked with a large organization that had different segments within their company. So think of a large retail organization that has corporate, that has stores, that has distribution centers. Right? That's pretty typical for a retail organization. Well, the types of workers in each of those different segments really comes from very different segments of the population. So you may actually consider three different comparator groups. One that's in manufacturing comparator group, one that's more of a retail, and one that's more of a corporate or white-collar types of roles.
Don't think that you just can compare to one type of organization. But it may be important that you look within your organization and split into different categories and use different industries to do your comparisons. Something people don't really think about, they think about sort of that organization as a whole and that you have to fit into just one industry group.
But you might need to segment your population differently to understand how those different pieces of your organization would be impacted.
Heather Grimshaw: Hearing you walk through that example is really helpful because if you have, every organization is different. So you would certainly want to make sure that you were comparing your data, your makeup, to someone or to an organization that looked like yours.
And you've mentioned this in a few different ways. The different types of benchmarking programs, I understand that they include plan and policy design, which is what DMEC offers. And I'm hoping that you can talk a little bit about how this data can be used.
So one example I've heard is that professionals can use data from these types of benchmarks to make business cases for introducing or expanding a program. Will you share a little bit more information about how plan and policy design benchmarks can be used?
Deborah LaBonar: Certainly the first opportunity here is to see how your current program stacks up. And this kind of goes back to where I started with the definition of comparing yourself to a standard. So if you have a plan in place, how does that compare in terms of the elements of that plan? How many weeks you're offering for a vacation, for example, or what your maximum benefit amount is for your long term disability plan, you can look at the elements of your plan to do some comparisons and then identify where the gaps may be so that as you're making that business case for your leadership, you can showcase where some of your plans may fall short of your comparator groups. I'd say another thing that I've done in the past is work with an employer who wanted to introduce a new paid parental program, but they didn't have the funds for it in their current leave program. So their executives challenged them and said, yep, we'd be happy to introduce a new paid parental program, but you need to find the money somewhere, right? So that's always the case. Where's the money going to come from? You want to introduce a new plan, whether it's a paid parental program or expand your vacation offering, because you feel that that's what needs to be done to be competitive. And so what we did was look at their other plans, their disability plans, and how their disability plans were funded and how they compared to their comparator groups. For example, looking at the way a long-term disability plan is funded. Now here you have a benefit which is very important for employees, but is not utilized by a bulk of the population, right? It's going to be very low incidence rate of your long-term disability plan. So taking some money from the long term disability plan and repurposing it to a benefit that more of your employees are going to be able to leverage made a lot of sense.
So we could sit down and look at where their current disability plans were funding and change it to a shared cost between the employer and the employee. Or you could change it to a fully employee funded or a buy-up plan. You know, there's a lot of different creative ways to repurpose some of those funds from some of those plans that have been around for many years and maybe needed some dusting off.
And there again comparing those plans to the comparative groups, what is really the base minimum that you need to be offering to your employees and then taking some of those funds so that you can offer some of those more rich plans to a larger employee base.
Heather Grimshaw: That's great. I love that reference to dusting off some of those plans that might have been around for a really long time and assessing usage. So I don't know that that's always top of mind for folks. And it leads me into my next question, which is the main audience for benchmarking projects. I'm wondering whether rank and file, absence and disability managers can use this type of data or is this more applicable for executives and consultants?
Deborah LaBonar: It really runs a spectrum. Certainly, as we've talked about, if you're using it to evaluate your current plans, you know, pulling that data in to identify the gaps, to identify the opportunities for the top level executives, I'd say surely using that is making the business case also just kind of a top level comparison. You know, on an annual report on annual basis, not giving them all of the details, but some of the comparisons so that they can see how you're performing. If you're trying to draw attention to something I would say I've mentioned about the attraction and retention of talent and I think this is a really important place where the leave and absence specialists and team can help funnel this information over to those who are doing the frontline recruiting for the organization. If you have really competitive benefits, you want to put that out there both for your current population so that everyone's aware of all the benefits that they have at their fingertips and how they compare. You know, you might get some retention there if you compare well to some other organization where somebody might be looking at and also to attract into the organization to really highlight some of those robust benefits in the leave space. So making sure that the folks who are doing that frontline recruiting also have the information as well as your top level executives. And then of course, those folks who are doing it day to day to understand the nuances of their programs and how they compare, I think it is.
Heather Grimshaw: Always that piece of the puzzle. Knowledge is power and being able to not only collect that information but also share it out is a big piece of that. What are the biggest benefits to disability and absence management professionals using benchmarking tools?
Deborah LaBonar: Well, certainly making those decisions using data. As a benchmarking and data person, I'm always going to be a big proponent of that. It's really hard, as we all know, to get anything passed in an organization based on a gut feeling or, you know, that, oh, everyone's doing it, so we need to do it. So, you know, your leadership is going to say, okay, everyone's doing it. Show it to me. And so this is the opportunity for you to kind of put that data behind your gut feeling of what you should be doing and where you should be focusing. It's also really important as you're designing new plans to understand those data elements. I think I've touched on that a couple of times. I worked with an organization who wanted to introduce a paid parental leave program. They'd already gotten the approval from leadership, so we were working with them on what were the, what did the design look like? So not just making that business case to have a program, but how many weeks are you going to offer?
How long does an employee need to be at the organization before they're eligible for that benefit? How can the benefit be used? In our space, we have the added complexity of continuous versus intermittent leaves. Right. Are you going to offer a Paid parental leave on an intermittent basis. When does your employee need to take the leave? Does it have to be taken immediately following the birth of the child? Can it be taken up to 12 months later? There's so many nuances to developing a plan besides just getting the financial approvals. But really figuring out all of those details and without some kind of comparison to know what others are doing in this space, you'd really be working with a blank slate. So it gives you that place to start and work from there.
Heather Grimshaw: Again, I think that that, as you said, the nuance it is, frankly, it's such a complex industry and you think, okay, I've gotten this approved. And then you go to the next step and realize all of the different pieces and parts you have to put together to create a really valuable, effective plan. So knowing that this data can be helpful there as well is, is wonderful. So the flip side of that question, of course, is what are the biggest hurdles? I've heard folks say that they collect a lot of data, but they're not necessarily using it strategically. Is this something that you've heard and helped folks address in previous roles?
Deborah LaBonar: Absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of people are afraid of data. Don't tell me data. I don't understand data. I don't know anything about data. So first you have to overcome that fear and really not getting too bogged down in it, but figuring out what those goals are.
I would even suggest, like I talked about at the beginning, some of those decision points you need to get started. Figure that out before you dive into the data. Who are your comparator groups? Where do you want to be in the pack, so to speak, and really focus your efforts in those areas and try not to get overwhelmed. I also think there can be, I hate to say a downside, but a caution. I would say a caution with using benchmarks because external benchmarks are other organizations. And it's important to recognize that your organization also has a unique culture and a unique history. And so, yes, using the benchmarks as a guideline, as a starting point, but also using a look within your organization to understand your culture and what's going to fit what your demographics look like. So thinking about things like, yeah, paid parental leave, that's like one of the newest, hottest, you know, types of leaves. Well, if your organization tends to skew older or, you know, a different demographic, it may not be as appealing. If you know, your average age is 45 in most of your employee base is past childbearing years, maybe a family leave is more valuable. Where they could then take time for their spouse or an elderly parent or older children. Right. So not just saying, oh, we need to be just like, you know, the neighbors, but also to consider yourself and how you might look different.
Heather Grimshaw: That's a great point. Knowing who your people are, what they value, and then how you customize and deliver those types of programs. I think you've done such a nice job of teeing us up for this benchmarking conversation, which DMEC is going to be exploring in the coming years in new and different ways. And so I'm going to be including some information in our notes section of this podcast. Really appreciate your time today, Debra, and look forward to continuing our conversation about how employers of all sizes and in all industries really can use data more strategically as they look at their absence and disability management programs.
Deborah LaBonar: Thank you, Heather.