Employees of Eastern are provided with benefits that vary from person to person.

Linda Holloway, the assistant director of Benefit Services, said employee benefits differ depending on whether the employee is an administrative/professional employee, a civil service employee, a coach or a faculty member.

Employees have a variety of plans available to them during orientation at Eastern depending on how many people they want to have covered and what kinds of benefits the employees are looking for.

Examples include health insurance, dental insurance and vision insurance, as well as fee waivers and disability plans.

She said one of Eastern’s most attractive benefits it offers employees is the retirement plan.

“It’s one of the things we use to recruit our employees” she said. “We offer tuition and fee waivers as well as child life insurance.”

Children of employees can receive discounted tuitions to Eastern depending on whether the employee is an administrative/professional employee or a civil service employee.

Though Holloway said the benefit plan is not all inclusive, Eastern does have other benefits for employees that might not come to mind at first, such as use of the library.

Eleven paid holidays are also included in employees’ benefits including New Year’s Day and Christmas Day.

Holloway said she is working on a survey to see what kind of optional benefits Eastern employees would like and are not currently receiving.

“If (employees) have other benefit interests, we want to go out and pursue them,” she said. “We’re trying to give people the option to rank them.”

Holloway said she hopes to take the top three or four employee interests and link up with a company sometime in the future that can help Eastern provide them.

When new employees come to Eastern, they go through an orientation process through Benefit Services that helps them become aware of what is available to them.

Holloway said the office staff likes to meet with each of the employee members one-on-one to provide a more individualized experience, but Benefit Services has been trying a new method this year.

“We’ve started offering an overview of all of our benefits in a group setting,” she said. “When they come and sit down and talk to us, they have a better idea of what they want and the questions they want to ask.”

Holloway said this has helped shorten the individualized sessions and makes sure everyone gets the same information overall.

She said while the benefits Eastern offers employees have not changed, the way the Benefits Services office communicates the benefits has.

“We always think we’re customer friendly, but I think we’ve really stepped up and used social media and Internet resources to communicate with our employees,” she said.

Robyn Dexter can be reached at 581-2812 or redexter@eiu.edu.