Americans think highly of the benefits, but feel that there is notable room for improvement.
A recent survey has shown that American workers place a high value on the benefits they can receive from life insurance, but that there is a great deal of room to improve the way that the system and coverage works.
This workplace benefits study was performed by an insurer in the industry.
The Guardian Workplace Benefits Study was conducted by Guardian Life Insurance Co. of America. It is meant to identify the value that workers place on those benefits, rating them on a scale of 1 to 10. The study found that the workers placed an average value of 6.8 on the coverage.
Overall, about half of U.S. workers stated that they were very satisfied with their life insurance benefits.
Equally, only 42 percent of employers had been under the impression that their employees were very satisfied with this coverage. Moreover, it looks as though there is an agreement between both employers and workers that the benefit programs that are being offered are not broadly understood, or that they are not adequately meeting the needs of many employees.
The benefits value index that was used within the Guardian life insurance study indicated that age, education, and gender impact the satisfaction that workers have with their benefits. For instance, those workers who are older and educated tend to assign a higher satisfaction score to their benefits than their younger or less educated counterparts. Equally, the study showed that women tend to place a higher value on their benefits than men.
Additional factors that impacted the results of the study included the industry, location, and size of the employer. Workers at larger organizations are often offered more benefits, better support for their benefits, and smaller contributions from the employees, so they generally achieved higher scores. The industries that achieved the greatest scores on the index were typically those in education, public administration, finance, insurance, and healthcare.
Those that had low life insurance satisfaction scores included transportation, automotive, and food services, where the workers had the perception of receiving low benefits.