Employers are shifting their wellness strategies to prevent people from getting sick in the beginning. Guy Clarkson says that by using a digital door to direct employees to the right support, employers can improve wellbeing.
A preventative strategy to promote wellbeing that keeps people healthy will be 3-4 times cheaper than treating them.
Only 65% of employees are aware of their benefits and 80% don’t fully utilize them.
To transform this situation, it is important to not only centralise and curate benefits, but also introduce a digital front-door to make it easier for employees to easily access all of their benefits in one location.
This can not only increase awareness of preventative measures, but also improve wellbeing.
Mercer Marsh Benefits reports that 80% of employees who have access to benefit technology are thriving, compared to only 54% of those who do not.
The digitalisation of access to wellness benefits has other benefits, including the ability to better direct employees to preventative support as well as better communication and opportunities to enhance what is available without increasing costs.
Signposting Support
Information about wellness benefits can be buried in emails and joiner packs, or on the intranet of a company if it is not properly curated.
Employers can use technology to centralise, digitise, and streamline employee benefits. This will not only help employees find support, but it will also direct them to preventative benefits.
Can you, for example, point an employee to a physiotherapy hotline before they are too sick to go to work because of a MSK issue? This will allow them to catch MSK issues in the early stages.
Can they be encouraged, if they have a mental health problem, to take advantage of the pre-paid counseling available through an employee assistance program before they become unable to work and trigger an income protection claim, or can they use the prepay counselling offered via an employee assistance program?
This proactive approach to employee well-being can help contain costs and make employees feel cared for.
Eighty-two percent (82%) of employees with access to digital benefits say that their employer is concerned about their health and well-being, as opposed to only one half (56%) who do not have a digital experience.
Hyper-personalisation
In the past, employers have given employees more choice by offering flexible benefits. Employees can choose from a variety of benefits.
Examples include dental, optical, physiotherapy, or cycle-to-work schemes. The time it takes to administer the individual benefits can limit the choices available.
Employers can hyper-personalise employee benefits by introducing employee benefit technology.
It could be introduced a fund for employee wellbeing that reimburses them for whatever they feel will support their well-being, whether it is rock climbing, mindfulness, or ballroom dance.
You can increase the engagement of people with health benefits by recognizing that everyone has different needs and priorities.
Over three quarters (78%) say that personalised benefits meet their needs compared to only 56% for those who do not have them.
Communication is key
When introducing digital front doors to employee benefits, employees often express gratitude for the “new” benefits package even though it was their old package.
These are often benefits that employees have had for years, but they’re not promoted, so they think they’re new.
It’s important to note that the communication of wellbeing benefits is often more important than the strategy itself.
The technology behind employee benefits allows for employees to receive targeted communications that are tailored to their specific needs.
It could be a benefit tailored to the employee’s gender and age, or a cancer screening program for those at highest risk.
“By recognising the fact that people have different needs, priorities and well-being… you can increase engagement dramatically.”
Many wellness providers now also offer additional services, apps and information that can be very useful to employees.
Some people may not have known that their private health insurance covered free private doctor’s appointments. Or that their partner could benefit from financial support.
You can ensure that employees know their rights by using benefit technology to consolidate this fragmented data behind your digital front-door.
You can boost employee happiness without spending more money on benefits.
We can expect AI to be used more and more to interpret analytics, and to guide employees via chatbots, automated campaigns and hard data, based upon analytics.
By automatically notifying employees of new benefits that they may be entitled to following a major life event such as a serious illness or birth of a child.
It’s therefore important to create the right foundation by centralising benefits so that future wellbeing communications can become even more personalised.
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