How to Evolve Your Benefits to Modernize, Reduce Costs, and Meet Changing Employee Needs
BY Christopher O'Keeffe
|
February 17, 2025
“HR needs a seat at the table,” said Dan Pikelny, VP of HR at ADT on the immense benefit of good benefits. At From Day One’s Chicago benefits half-day conference, Pikelny spoke about the critical role benefits play in attracting, engaging, and retaining employees in today’s workforce.
Pikelny emphasized that benefits manifest before the final offer is signed—they start with recruitment. “The first thing that happens is they have to become an employee. So you have to attract them. So when a company is interviewing an employee, an employee is deciding whether to join, they are giving up a lot of their time, a lot of their family, a lot of their talents, and they want something back,” he said. “They want to be compensated for that, but they also want a sense of security.”
Leaders at ADT, a 150-year-old company, have focused on its security for the entire duration of its existence so far. Security isn’t about break ins, but “what happens if there’s an illness or retirement,” said Pikelny.
This shift required a new approach to human capital. “We’ve become a technology company, so the strategy of the company has literally changed, and as a result, the human capital strategy has changed,” Pikelny said. “The type of people that we need to attract and retain are different from the types of people we had to attract and retain before.”
“Wellness programs are probably the biggest tool for engagement that a company can leverage,” Pikelny told moderator Karl Ahlrichs, HR leadership columnist and consultant. “It gives employees something to be part of that’s greater than them, as opposed to just the things that they produce—spreadsheets or code or PowerPoints or anything else.”
ADT has developed a structured listening strategy to understand employee needs. “We use employee surveys at multiple points—after 60, 90, and 180 days of employment, during annual engagement surveys, and exit interviews. We even listen to what our candidates are saying during recruitment,” he shared. “That’s how we identified the need for paid parental leave.”
It’s important to try new things, says Pikelny, knowing that failure might be an outcome. One experiment involved linking 401(k) contributions to employee performance. “We made our 401(k) plan performance-based,” Pikelny said. “We very quickly heard loud and clear from our employees that they don’t want their retirements linked to performance. The following year, we changed it back.”
“Benefits are a huge part of the cash flow statement. I mean, we're right up there with salaries,” Pikelny said. “It’s difficult to measure things that don’t happen because you’ve got benefits, right? And so we need to figure out better communication skills with the CFO,” he advised.
To demonstrate the value of benefits, leaders at ADT developed a turnover model. “We’ve built a turnover model that identifies factors contributing to employee departures. Some of those factors are outside of benefits, like manager relationships, but many are directly tied to them,” he said. “If we can connect better benefits to lower turnover, that’s a metric leadership understands.”
Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.
