Melanie Langsett Deloitte: Here Are Our Five Most Successful Employee Benefits and Perks

Employee benefits and perks can help set your compensation package apart and make a real difference in the lives of your workers. In this series, we ask prominent HR and business leaders which benefits and perks have been most successful in their organizations. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Melanie Langsett.

A principal in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Human Capital practice, Melanie has more than 30 years of employee benefit administration and human capital consulting experience serving a wide range of Fortune 500, nonprofit, and public sector clients. Melanie consults her clients about the full talent life-cycle with a particular expertise in transforming the way employers recognize and reward their workforce to maximize business outcomes. Melanie is frequently asked to speak on total rewards and human resource topics and has provided numerous training sessions for plan sponsors on leading practices in benefit operations.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Before we drive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I have always been passionate about transforming employers’ relationships with their workforces to maximize employee experience and drive business outcomes — it’s something that has shaped more than three decades of my experience in the talent space, including my journey at Deloitte. Today, as the head of Rewards, Recognition, and Well-being for Deloitte US, I am proud to lead the team responsible for the strategy, design, and delivery of our programs that empower more than 170,000 Deloitte professionals and their dependents to thrive mentally, physically, and financially.

My goal is to continue reimagining how we support our people through the development and execution of rewards, recognition and well-being strategies that deliver one of the most supportive and exceptional talent experiences any company has to offer.

Given the work I do, it will come as no surprise how much I believe in the power of mentoring and coaching and its importance in long-term career development. I love spending my time helping others grow professionally and personally. This often includes lending my skills and experience to external training sessions.

Outside of work, I enjoy spending time exploring the sights, sounds, and tastes of my new (ish) hometown — Chattanooga, Tennessee. And I’m always rooting for my alma mater, Georgia Tech — go Yellow Jackets!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I truly believe that no one achieves success alone and there are many individuals that are part of my story. Two individuals who stand out:

• My first boss had a purple pen that she used to “redline” work product. This was before the days of laptops and even individual desktops, so a deliverable was generally a letter that was typed on a typewriter and if you messed up, you had to start over from scratch. As a new employee right out of college, my boss did a thorough quality review of all my correspondence. Although I came to loathe that purple pen, my boss helped me learn to be a better business writer and communicator.
• The other story was the CEO of a company I joined midway through my career who saw potential in me that I didn’t realize I had. I was newer to the organization, had observed opportunities to improve operations and outcomes, and decided to share those observations with leadership. The CEO not only gave me the opportunity to be heard, but then offered me the role to advance my own feedback by joining the organization’s leadership team and shepherding a significant redirection of one of our businesses. He made sure that I had the support I needed including active mentorship and sponsorship.

Let’s now move to the central part of our interview. What are your five most successful employee benefits and perks?

1 . Deloitte’s generous well-being subsidy is one of our most popular benefits, with an almost 90% utilization rate. As part of this subsidy, we provide our professionals with $1,000 each fiscal year towards the purchase of one or more qualifying items that can support their well-being. We’ve seen people use it for the purchase of gym memberships and sports equipment, home office furniture and mattresses, financial wellness apps and courses, musical instruments and karaoke machines — even solar panels, and composting, as well as gardening equipment.

2 . Back in 2014, Deloitte launched a collective paid time off offering. Deloitte’s Collective Disconnect days are times when our entire workforce is off at the same time, usually tied to federal holidays to create even longer consecutive stretches of time off. Collective Disconnects are just one element of our generous PTO program through which Deloitte professionals have as many as 40 days off to spend in the ways that are most important to them — whether for vacation, caring for themselves or loved ones, or celebrating special moments or holidays that are most relevant to them. Our flexible approach to time off puts our people in the driver’s seat in deciding how to use their time off and allows enough time to focus on restoring energy so they can return to work with renewed vigor and fresh perspectives. Our professionals tell us that Collective Disconnects are one of their favorite benefits because they provide the ability to truly unplug from work.

3 . Deloitte’s Integrated Mental Health Services (IMHS) offer a personalized, concierge-style approach to support our people and their eligible dependents’ psychological health along the continuum of human experience―from thriving to challenged. Our in-house team of psychologists and experts facilitate the delivery of clinical and Performance Psychology services through a highly curated, private panel of clinical professionals and Performance Psychology experts. There is no cost to our professionals to speak with a mental health clinician, and they may qualify for up to eight complimentary counseling sessions, per incident / per year. Since we launched IMSH two years ago, we have had tremendous response from our professionals on how supported they feel in their most vulnerable moments.

4 . Bright Horizons emergency back-up dependent care and family support services offer options and support when our professionals need to be at work and their regular child or adult/elder care arrangements fall through or are unavailable. Family support services in times like this provide easy access to resources when researching babysitters, nannies, housekeepers, and elder care providers as well as dog sitters. This perk affords our professionals peace of mind as their family members and furry friends are taken care of by trusted professionals.

5 . FertilityIQ is an online resource that provides inclusive and equitable educational materials about fertility-related subjects and extensive data to help our people plan for and build their unique family. It also offers educational courses to equip anyone — no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation, relationship status, or diagnosis — with valuable information about fertility basics, as well as treatments like intrauterine insemination (IUI) and In vitro fertilization (IVF), fertility preservation, menopause and more.

How do you decide which benefits to offer as part of your compensation package?

At Deloitte, we’re very aware that our professionals are our greatest asset and that their ability to meet business objectives depends in large part on their well-being. We solicit input from our professionals — through periodic pulse surveys to our annual Talent Survey, listen to our teams around what they need, and dig into enrollment, engagement, and utilization data to determine how we can best support their work-life integration. At Deloitte, we offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits package that is designed to suit the priorities and preferences of everyone. We want our employees to have the flexibility to build the life they want and choose the benefits that go with it.

We’re very pleased to see that our approach is working — our professionals cited well-being and benefits among the top reasons why they consider Deloitte to be a great place to work.

How do you ensure your team members understand the benefits available to them and utilize them?

Engagement is key to ensuring benefits live up to their name and can further the overall well-being of our professionals. We tackle this need in a multi-channel model: communicate, educate, activate. We organize our benefits in the pillars of personal well-being: Thriving Mentally, Thriving Physically, and Thriving Financially and present our benefits to our people around the moments that matter in their professional and personal lives — starting with us, planning for the unexpected, caring for loved ones, caring for personal well-being, etc. In this way, we’re meeting people where they are in their lives with curated content that is designed to help them address their immediate needs.

But the best engagement plan is only as good as the role-modeling our people see from their leaders and the support they receive from their teams. A simple, but powerful example of this is taking time off. I have consistently taken all my annual PTO since I joined Deloitte 23 years ago, with a combination of longer vacations (two-three weeks is the sweet spot for me to truly unplug), long weekends, and extended time around Deloitte’s holidays and Collective Disconnects. As a Principal and leader within Deloitte, I know how important it is that leaders walk the talk and show that they are using the offerings provided by the organization, and this includes vacation time!

How do you determine if benefits are successful or not? Could you share a time when you realized that a particular benefit or perk was making a significant difference for your employees?

Like most other areas of business, key performance indicators are important to be able to measure the success of a benefit program or entire portfolio. The KPIs we use are designed in support of our business, talent, and rewards strategies. And those measures are not about how many people used a benefit, or how much a program costs, but what impact is occurring. One example is Deloitte’s Medical Travel Benefit. Our program was improved in June 2022 to cover the cost of medical travel for in-network services not available within 100 miles of a professional’s home. One story that stands out to me was an employee who had been traveling nearly 300 miles monthly with their young child for care for a rare disease and how this benefit covering the cost of travel was invaluable to her family — removing the financial burden and allowing her to focus on the health of her child.

What are your top 3 tips for developing a successful benefits and perks program that keeps an org competitive and aids employee well-being and satisfaction?

While approaches to benefits and perks vary from organization to organization, here’s what we’ve found to be most successful at Deloitte:

Listening to our people

The approach we take is often driven by data but focused on our people. We have numerous pulsing processes in place to understand our professionals’ needs and address them effectively through a comprehensive set of benefits and well-being offerings.

Iterating to consistently meet needs

It’s important for us to stay on the pulse of whether and how our professionals’ needs are evolving so we can be agile enough and support their well-being consistently as workforce preferences evolve over time.

Being patient with results

While metrics are an important measure of benefits and perks adoption, a lot of well-being is about driving broader behavioral change, which takes time, so we are patient with the results our rewards and well-being offerings provide.

In your opinion, what are the most undervalued or overlooked benefits or perks that more companies should consider offering?

While benefits and perks to a large extent differ across industries and workforce needs, one thread that ties all workers together, regardless of where, when, or how they work, is mental health, and its intersection with financial well-being. Surveys indicate that many workers are stressed or anxious at work all or most of the time, and that their longer-term financial futures and day-to-day finances, are among the top stress drivers. Participation in programs that allow pre-tax savings for dependent care, transportation, healthcare, and retirement savings are great ways to help to reduce immediate and long-term financial stress. And the earlier in someone’s career that they start to use these types of benefits, the better for long-term well-being.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Melanie’s LinkedIn

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!