One of the major themes to come up at MAD World this year was the low engagement rates in Health and Wellbeing (see this feature) and, related to this, speakers and delegates spoke specifically about the need to approach benefits differently.
Currently, the way Health and Wellbeing benefits are often talked about is very transactional and impersonal. Former AXA Health Mental Health Consulting Lead Eugene Farrell goes as far as to say that the language is “dull” and “needs to change”.
Given that benefits can potentially change, or even save, an employee’s life – think cancer screening or private medical care treatment – the way they are described and communicated frequently lacks emotional connection and resonance. Even the phrase “benefits package” and “service” and “products” sound sterile and uninspiring.
Getting higher engagement rates is undoubtedly partly about making clear exactly how these benefits can improve an individual’s life, or the lives of loved ones (as many employers now include family on policies). But it’s also about buying benefits differently, making them easier to access and simplifying them for employees.
Benefits can be a powerful force, not necessarily in changing culture, but in supporting culture change and showing employees the value of Health & Wellbeing, as well as how much they are valued by their employer.
This feature outlines 5 ways to make benefits come to life more for your employees and forge more of an emotional connection with them, based on insights gathered at MAD World on 17th October.
Streamline your benefits product offering
Several speakers spoke about the confusing and fragmented landscape of benefits in their companies, especially at large, global multinationals.
For example, Elton Dorkin, Chief Medical Officer at Rio Tinto, in a session on creating informed and effective wellbeing strategies, talked about the duplication of products making it confusing for employees and leading to analysis paralysis, as well as over-provision:
“We’ve got a highly fragmented health offering. When I look at the variety of benefits available I feel like we are almost making it worse for the employee by adding on extra layers of products. Take access to a gym. I can use our gym benefit, which is a standalone gym. Or I can access a gym via my Bupa app or I could access the Nuffield system in my local community. We are faced with all this complexity trying to get better.”
Consequently the main questions he is constantly asking himself when considering benefits and urged delegates to ask, are:
“How can we make it simpler? Can we make it easier for people to make the right choices?”
With the increasing cost of health provision for employees, as awareness improves and more access it, duplicating products is expensive and eats into already stretched budgets.
Simplification not only saves money, but makes benefits much easier for employees to make a choice and take action.
Push back on pressure from the rest of the business to buy products urgently
One delegate, in response to the session on creating effective and informed wellbeing strategies, asked the panel for advice on a common challenge with benefits: the pressure from the rest of the business to offer certain products because competitors are, and wanting to get these offers to market as quickly as possible.
She said:
“Lots of our Health and Wellbeing benefits have been around for a while and are evolving. There is commercial pressure in terms of the business asking – are you offering benefits others are offering? If you’re not, why not? How do you balance that as a Wellbeing Lead and how can you help slow the business down so it’s not just knee-jerk thinking about what’s needed?”
Steve IIey, Chief Medical Officer, Jaguar Land Rover, shared his top tip for dealing with this situation is to “say yes to everything”.
By this he meant that when a colleague comes to you with a suggestion, or a benefit they want to buy, then always keep the lines of communication with them open. The process of having that conversation is then a way to slow them down and get them to really think through whether the benefit is right strategically. The danger of saying no from the outset, and shutting down the conversation, is the risk that colleagues who have buying power will simply go ahead and buy the benefit without your approval, which adds to the disparate and confusing nature of the company’s offering.
As he said:
“If you want to be part of the conversation in your business, you need to say yes to everyone for everything. So when somebody says, ’can we do this?’ say ‘absolutely, we can definitely do that, let’s have a conversation’. Then you can steer them in the direction of the overall strategy, or you might kick it into the long grass and it never actually happens. But the important thing is you’re slowing down and having the conversation.”
Educate the rest of the business on how buying Health and Wellbeing benefits is not like buying widgets
As Iley also says, in some respects Wellbeing has become a victim of its own success; “in many organisations, especially once they reach a certain size, everybody’s interested in Wellbeing and everyone thinks they own it, and everyone wants to buy it and you end up with multiple different forms of provision that don’t fit together”.
The biggest “problem” he sees is an “uneducated buyer who just wants to buy something to tick the box of Wellbeing but it doesn’t fit with what the business needs”.
Rio Tinto panellist Dorkin agreed that benefits teams need “guidance” on how to buy Wellbeing products more effectively, because it’s completely different from buying, say, machinery or widgets. What has been key at Rio Tinto is that the benefits team liaise with Dorkin when a benefit touches on Health.
“They ask for your input or better still, distill your guidance into a document that they can read so that, by the time the product comes to you, they’ve already been through the basics,” he said. “The conversation would be so much richer if we could educate ourselves and our teams on buying better.”
Both panellists pointed delegates to the new evidence-based guide for buying Wellbeing products and services which draws on the latest evidence and learnings from leading professionals. It’s been created by the Society of Occupational Medicine in association with Affinity Health At Work.
“If we could all use documents like this it would improve the conversation significantly between buyers and sellers,” said Dorkin.
Focus on buying benefits which fill in the gaps in NHS provision
In the session on benefits at MAD World entitled ‘The next big thing in employee health and wellbeing benefits’, facilitator Rashree Chhatrisha, Director of Pensions and Benefits, Saga, predicted that employees value Private Medical Insurance so much that the possibilities for preventative products around this – such as health screening – have the power to “revolutionise” benefits in the near future.
To go back to what we said in the introduction, when it comes to treating an individual, or a loved one’s health, this is such an emotive issue that these are the benefits which really make a difference. They are the benefits which make employees feel they are genuinely valued by an employer, as well as helping to attract and retain workers. Even though, as Chhatrisha mentioned, from a “budget and cost perspective, it’s getting very expensive”.
Employees particularly are increasingly recognising the value of benefits when they fill the gaps in NHS provision and offer a more convenient, easily accessible option. For instance, now that the NHS is really under pressure and many individuals are struggling to access basic services – like seeing their GP in a timely fashion – benefits like a virtual GP are making people’s lives, and health, better.
Be more Amazon; reduce friction in your platform to access benefits
In the same session on benefits, Francis Goss, Director, MoneyFit Financial Wellbeing, pointed out that “engagement levels of these [benefits] platforms are disappointingly low”. He put this down to the fact that the user experience is “quite clunky”, adding:
“We need to minimise friction. Look at Amazon. They minimise friction and that’s what we, as consumers, are used to now; one click and it arrives tomorrow.”
He believes employers need to do the same when trying to engage employees with their benefits offering, even making the process “fun as well”.
“We have quizzes, we have games,” he said. “We have three cartoon animals to represent people’s attitudes to financial wellbeing. It just adds a bit of fun and it gets past those cognitive biases that stop people from engaging on the topic.”
Another thing that fellow panellist Katy Downes, Head of Reward, National Gas, said had really helped increase engagement in the benefits platform was actually “walking people through it”.
“It’s all very well saying ‘oh click here, and click there’ but it’s better, and worth the time, if you can physically show them how to do it,” she said.
As we said in this feature, we need to remember that Wellbeing professionals are hugely knowledgeable when it comes to Health, and can’t assume that employees have the same knowledge, or even basic knowledge. It’s better to start simple and talk about how the benefits could improve their lives, rather than overload them with information they don’t fully understand, or platforms that make no sense, so they are paralysed into indecision.
