Cost vs. value: how to evaluate an employee benefit

For your employees, an employee benefits package that enhances their lives and protects the things that matter most to them is incredibly important. Effective benefits that help them protect their health, their finances, and their future can be the difference between staying in a role or leaving for a new one. However, these benefits aren’t just valuable to employees—they can also provide value to organizations. By helping corporations save money, protect profits, and boost productivity, the cost of a benefit can be offset.

However, determining if a benefit will drive value for your organization can be difficult. But don’t worry—with this short guide, you can quickly determine whether a new benefit will drive value for your organization.

Does the benefit enhance employee retention and attract new talent?

While things like salary and career advancement are a big factor in retaining employees and attracting new talent, your employee benefit package also plays a huge role in these efforts.

Employees that are satisfied with their benefits are five times more likely to say they’ll stay with their employer, and with 73 percent saying benefits matter as much or even more than salary when choosing to stay in a role or accept a new one, building an enticing employee benefits package is a priority. This is especially true when you consider how expensive it is to replace an employee, with estimates ranging from 50 percent to 200 percent of their yearly salary.

With scams and fraud impacting 36 million people in 2025, a benefit that can help employees prevent fraud and recover funds lost to fraud can be very attractive to both existing and potential employees. A comprehensive identity protection benefit can help employees combat the growing problem of identity theft and scams and prevent damage to their finances. And with other features like family digital safety tools, this benefit can also help employees protect the other important things in their life.

And not only can identity and scam protection help employees protect their finances, but it can also help them save money. By giving employees the opportunity to purchase identity and scam protection, as well as other services, as an employee benefit, they can save a significant amount of money versus purchasing the same services at retail price.

Does the benefit support existing corporate efforts or strategies?

For corporations, investing in strategies and programs that drive value and protect profits is a critical pillar of success. This can include teaching valuable skills, investing in tools to enhance productivity, risk mitigation strategies, and more. And if your organization can implement a benefit that enhances or supports these efforts, you can indirectly improve the cost to value ratio of that benefit.

With scams ($11 billion in losses in 2025), cyberattacks ($20.9 billion in 2025), and fraud ($38 billion in losses in 2025) resulting in significant losses, many organizations are investing in programs that educate employees on how to recognize and avoid these threats. While these programs can be effective, it can be difficult to keep employees up to date on the latest scams and fraud with how quickly they evolve.

An identity protection benefit helps to enhance these programs by providing the latest intelligence on scams and fraud, giving employees the information they need to avoid becoming victims and potentially exposing an organization to losses, data breaches, and more. An identity protection benefit also compliments cybersecurity programs by equipping employees with cyber protection on their personal devices, which not only protects employees from scams and fraud by detecting malicious websites, messages, and more, but can also protect company data that might be on those devices.

Does the benefit improve or protect employee productivity?

When it comes to evaluating the cost to value ratio of an employee benefit, determining its impact on employee productivity is the ultimate test.

If the benefit helps to enhance or protect productivity, you can create a direct link between the service the benefit provides and the return your organization receives on its investment.

Estimating the return on investment of an identity protection benefit can be difficult. However, we’ve put together a way for you to get an idea of how much an identity protection benefit could potentially save your company. Here’s an example of how to calculate the losses that can result from identity theft—just keep in mind this is for illustrative purposes only.

• Take the total number of employees in your organization

• Multiply the number of employees by .05 (5% is the national identity theft incident rate), which will give you the estimated number of potential identity theft cases at your organization per year

• Multiply that number by 10 (the average number of hours victims spend resolving identity theft themselves), which gives you the total number of hours employees will spend resolving identity theft

• To estimate the total annual productivity loss, take the number of hours employees spend resolving identity theft, and multiply it by 32, which is the average hourly wage

By reducing the amount of time employees spend resolving identity theft and scams, an identity protection benefit can help protect employee productivity and help prevent workplace disruptions. And with the affordable nature of an identity protection benefit, it’s a low-cost way for organizations to reduce the productivity losses related to identity theft, or even help reduce them.

To learn more about how Allstate Identity Protection can help your organization reduce corporate risk, protect profits, and enhance employee retention, visit our Business Hub.