We Are Our Own Customer: Here’s How It Works

By day, Amy Spartz is head of human resources at Gravie and by night, she oversees operations at the Minneapolis restaurants she owns with her husband Jeff. As a Gravie employee, Gravie member and Gravie customer, Amy is very familiar with the complexities and strategies behind offering employee benefits. Check out her post below! It’s an age-old dilemma for employers and HR professionals – how do I provide meaningful benefits to my employees, keep my head above the headaches and confusion around compliance and administration, and establish and stick to a benefits budget that my business can afford? While Gravie focuses on providing “better benefits for all” and great service for our members, we’re also an employer. And we ask the same questions to find the best answers for our unique team.

So what’s our strategy?

• We believe our employees are best served by choice. We want to remove as many constraints as possible around their choices, and we do this by placing the selection of benefits directly into our employee’s hands. Not ours. Just like all Gravie customers, our employees get help from our licensed expert advisors and shop with our member website, so they have “smart tech, human touch” resources to make a great choice for their needs.

• While we don’t follow the traditional group insurance model, we still keep an eye on that market to ensure we’re competitive in how much money we give our employees to purchase benefits. But most importantly, we discover what employees value the most in terms of benefits, where their pain points are, and what would make them most happy. We look at some surveys, but most importantly and simply – we ask our employees.

• Just like our employer customers, the Gravie human resources team “outsources” our more complex administrative and compliance requirements to the Gravie account managers. It allows our HR team to focus on important things to Gravie – like our business, our culture, and our employees. And by outsourcing our compliance and administrative duties internally to the account management team, we get to experience the value they provide our customers firsthand.

The bottom line is this: we want our employees to spend their benefits dollars the way they want to spend them. Not the way we think they should be spent. It’s the foundation of why we started Gravie and the foundation of how we serve customers, including our own employees.