How Bennie's Aggressive Negotation and Market Advocacy Saved Drata Over $550,000
About Drata
Our Customer
Automating Trust and Compliance
Drata is a leading security and compliance automation platform that helps thousands of companies streamline their compliance workflows and build trust with their customers. Headquartered in San Diego with a distributed workforce across the country, Drata is in the business of reliability. As an established, fast-scaling organization crossing the chasm into the early majority, maintaining a culture of security and excellence is a priority. This commitment extends directly to how they treat their people, offering a benefits package designed to recruit and retain the best talent in the tech industry.
Our goal is to take the best care of our employees that we possibly can.
Our HR Leaders
Meet Brooke and Melissa
Brooke Worzalla leads the People team at Drata, overseeing talent acquisition, total rewards, and HR operations. For Brooke, benefits are a critical tool for risk mitigation and employee retention. "My role with benefits is helping Melissa and team with our benefits offerings and our total rewards going to our employee population. I partner with our executive team on cost containment and risk mitigation."
Partnering with her is Melissa Gagné, Director of Total Rewards. Melissa brings a wealth of experience across various funding models from fully insured to self-insured. "I am responsible for our compensation, our equity program and importantly, benefits programs as well." Together, they manage a population of over 500 benefits-eligible employees with a clear mandate: offer best-in-class benefits to take care of their teams.
HR Challenges
As Drata continued to scale, they needed an established partner to help them navigate rising costs and service friction.
With a lean team managing a large and growing population, Brooke and Melissa were bracing for a difficult renewal cycle following a year of high claims.
1. Strategic Market Position
Maintaining Competitive Benefits Amidst Rising Costs
Drata was fully aware of the technology industry benchmarks, which suggest significantly higher employee contributions. However, leadership made the pragmatic decision to stay at 100% employer-paid medical to maintain their competitive edge. The challenge was maintaining this high-employee-value position while facing a 21.5% initial renewal increase from the medical carrier.
2. Improved Ancillary Support
Moving Beyond Generic Service Models
The team wanted to move away from a "generic" service model often associated with legacy brokers. Their previous ancillary network was not as robust as it needed to be for a nationwide workforce, and they wanted a carrier that offered better customer service and higher quality provider directories.
3. Efficient Integrations
Access to Better Technology and Reduced Friction
Legacy vendors for account-based benefits like FSA and HSA were causing daily headaches due to limited functionality and poor service.
Their service was poor. Employees weren’t seeing the value of additional features and connectivity with our payroll system.
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Protecting a People-First Culture Through Expert Negotiation
The Results
How Market Negotiation Preserved Best-in-Class Benefits for Drata
The challenges Drata faced with rising rates and poor vendor service have been resolved through working with Bennie. They now get true benefits support; the People team knows they can reach out with concerns and their consultant will do whatever they can to help.
From a financial perspective, the organization achieved a massive win by securing a significant budget surplus.
We did look at what would be the cost savings if we changed our strategy to come up with that 20-something percent increase. But finding the savings allowed us to protect that 100% employer contribution.
Since many of the tedious benefits-related tasks and integrations are now taken care of by Bennie, the People team can focus on strategy and building new things for their employees.
The satisfaction our employees are getting from the Bennie team—the ability for me to say, ‘You know what, if you have a question, please call them first’—speaks volumes. Even beyond hours saved in my time, having the confidence to direct our employees in that way is the true ROI.