Culture Signals: Elevating Employee Benefits at Level
Level believes using your employee benefits should be as easy as buying a cup of coffee, not a complicated reimbursement process or a limited marketplace. But before employees get benefits, Level needs clarity on who makes benefits decisions in a radically shifting landscape of competitive hiring, tech layoffs, and shifting company cultures post-pandemic.
Offering
Researcher-in-Residence
Sector
Employee Benefits
Approach
Teaming up with Level's Brand department for a 3-month Researcher-in-Residence initiative, we employed a mixed-methods approach, conducting qualitative interviews with benefits decision-makers from a range of organizations, evaluating internal documents and calls, and analyzing industry insights.
Key Question
Navigating shifting business paradigms, Level aimed to redefine its benefits narrative. Their core deliverable had shifted from vision and dental care to a wider-reaching idea of accessible benefits for all. By creating a new kind of company card that could automatically sort purchases into pre-defined buckets, Level was ready to eliminate reimbursements, receipts, and the fronting of money or limited choices accompanying employee benefits.
The question then was, how do we tell this story? And to whom?
Deliverables
Our collaboration yielded two pivotal research deliverables, building off each other.
The first was an in-depth look into the power dynamics within organizations around employee benefits and how that power has shifted from 2020 to 2022. Through this, we built empathy for HR and the conflicting choices they’re balancing. This presentation aligned Level’s growing team around the current context they’re building for.
Next, we created a strategic approach to how employee benefits act as signals of company culture and can be a critical factor of building an intentional culture. Through it, we laid out Level’s two possible futures with key frameworks for the work ahead.
Example showing how identified values are reenforced and signaled with benefits.
Frameworks to help explain the relationship between values, benefits, and culture.
Outcomes
The Researcher-in-Residence role fostered seamless collaboration, ensuring knowledge transfer and organizational alignment. Our engagement facilitated deeper insights and enhanced engagement across teams, laying the groundwork for sustainable cultural transformation.