单项选择题

Employee Benefits
As the bill for U.S. health care mounts, companies struggle to reconcile their need to off-set the rising cost of employee benefits with the desire to attract and retain the best talent. Some engage in an arms race of sorts, blindly matching or beating the benefits offered by competitors and spending billions of dollars in the process. Yet these benefits often fail to reflect either the preferences of employees or corporate objectives.
A few companies, however, are changing the game. Emerging best practices are reducing the cost of benefits by 10 percent to 20 percent a year, keeping employee satisfaction steady or better and linking these expenditures more tightly to corporate objectives, particularly investments in talent to gain competitive advantage. Such investments are increasingly important to the profitable growth of the world’s most successful companies, from 1995 to 2005 profits per employee jumped to $83,000, from $35,000, and the number of employees more than doubled. Benefits represent a major part of that outlay: U.S. companies spend more than $2 trillion on them each year, but though the cost of health care in particular is on the rise, companies aren’t scrutinizing benefits as closely as they do with other investments.
Benefits are much more than just a cost of doing business, even though many executives don’t understand that. In many companies, the chief financial officer hands down a cost goal for benefits each year, and then the HR Department works to meet it. In the end, business unit leaders get stuck with increasingly expensive benefits without understanding what they get in return.
We advocate a much more active approach: employers should tailor their investment in benefits to the preferences of their employees, as some leading companies have done already. The same sophisticated market research tools companies now use to launch products and services ought to be used to define employee "customer" segments. Benefits packages should then be tailored and marketed to them accordingly. This approach, balanced with return-on-investment (ROI) objectives and rolled out over several years, will help companies meet their increasingly vital need to offer knowledge workers higher rewards while minimizing the cost of employing a large frontline workforce.
When buzz about a potential change in benefits makes its way through employee networks, they often respond with anxiety and consternation. Companies should approach them with the same caution that consumers get, using market research to understand the workforce, segment it, and gauge its responses to potential changes. When a company tinkers with benefits, it should "brand" the adjustments with themes that research shows are important to employees. Then it should aim those themes at relevant employee segments and actively address the concerns of people who will dislike the changes, while also emphasizing the positive ones that other segments will applaud.
These efforts should take the form of a marketing campaign, similar to what the company would use to launch a new product that emphasizes aspects of change employees will value. E-mail, the Web, mailers, and company newsletters ought to explain, in simple language, the nature of the changes, their rationale, and the improvements they will bring. Such communications should also directly address things that certain segments of the workforce may dislike, balancing these changes with the positive ones dictated by the preferences of the majority. A benefit "hotline" (on the telephone, the Web, or both) lets employees ask questions and voice concerns. This important tool helps the company to get real-time reactions and to identify and lubricate squeaky wheels.
According to the second paragraph, it is important for companies to