The 10^th anniversary of the prestigious MetLife Study of Employee Benefit Trends highlighted the need for cutting edge benefits like Marketplace Chaplains which today serves more than 500 corporate clients with 2,669 service locations in the U.S. and worldwide. Each year, the national study explores an evolving benefits landscape from the point of view of employers and employees across all U.S. regions, industries and company sizes. Through both robust years and turbulent economic times, the study has identified significant key findings and insights that have served to inform and shape today’s benefits strategies for employers and their advisors.

The study marks a decade of decoding and discovering these benefits. A key finding this year is 60% of surveyed employers recognize the precarious economic climate, rather than reducing business focus on employee benefits, actually creates opportunity for benefits to drive human capital. In addition, the study found employees are less committed to their employers, but at the same time, are highly dependent on their workplace benefits according to the published study summary.

That’s exactly what Rilo Stephens, President & CEO of Atlanta-based client company, Eckardt Electric Co. found when he decided to employ Marketplace Chaplains as a new employee benefit for his company.

It’s important to have someone on-site and professionally trained to be there for the employees and their family members,” he said of his growing company of 125 employees spread out over the Southeast U.S. “Our customers are asking more of us and we are asking more of each other; it’s a very pressured and stressed time for all of us and we see the chaplains make a huge impact on all of us.”

According to the published information, one of the Study’s most significant findings is the strong relationship between satisfaction with benefits and job satisfaction.  First noted in 2004 and every year since, this correlation creates compelling evidence for the power of benefits to drive a universal set of business objectives – employee attraction, retention and productivity. It is a central tenet for benefits professionals and justifies benefits investment to senior management.

“It doesn’t matter if the company is large or small, Fortune 100 or family-owned, having a professional caregiver who is a trained and caring Marketplace Chaplain has proven to benefit the company’s bottom line and their top line, employees and their family members,” said Marketplace Chaplains’ President & COO Dick De Witt.

“Our industry has seen a great deal of change over the last four-to-five years and putting the chaplain service in place is one of the best business decisions I have made,” added Stephens.

Ten years ago employees expected benefits, but were far less engaged in their true value, the study reported. Today, new economic realities are driving employees to more fully appreciate the benefits that their employers provide – even if they have to pay more of the costs themselves.

The benefits are an indispensable ingredient in how the working American family achieves short- and long-term financial security. Indeed it’s unlikely that workplace benefits have ever been as desirable or important as they are in the current era.