Ben Sawyer of Labcorp: why having a benefits brand can drive better engagement

The challenge of engaging employees with wellbeing initiatives is universal. As the old adage goes, you can bring the horse to water, but you can't make it drink. So how can you go about encouraging and persuading employees to take the final step and engage with your benefits offering?

Ben Sawyer, associate director, benefits at Labcorp, believes that creating a separate brand for wellbeing and benefits can help to cut through the corporate noise and build trust in the benefits available.

Why develop a separate benefits brand?

“It was very much a conscious decision to develop a separate wellbeing brand,” explains Sawyer. “There's so much information that flies around, there's a danger that sometimes employees just dismiss it. And that's particularly true of wellbeing and of benefits.”

By creating a separate brand, with different colours to those used in corporate communications, it differentiates from broader company messages and prevents it from being lost among other communications. It makes it clear that the message is about benefits and wellbeing, and it could be something that is relevant to the individual or to someone they know.

“By having its own branding it has been given its own identity. It has its own brand, its own image, and therefore, you should be able to trust in what's there. And it's also making it clear that our employee assistance programme (EAP) is through an external partner that is wholly confidential,” says Sawyer.

The idea of confidentially and trust is particularly important due to the make-up of Labcorp’s workforce, many of whom are medical professionals who can be reluctant to engage with benefits, particularly health-related ones. Therefore, having access to an EAP which is confidential and provided through an external partner can help to increase trust in the benefits offered and encourage engagement.

“The EAP for me has got to be seen, not necessarily as a benefit, but as a tool that anyone can use at any time. For managers it’s part of your toolkit to understand what your team may be going through. As an employee, it's here for you to use or for you to recommend to your colleague,” adds Sawyer.

It’s not all about the brand

Of course, creating a separate brand for wellbeing, although effective, is not a silver bullet. As with any benefits provision, it requires ongoing promotion to engage employees with the offering and, for Sawyer, a key element of this process is having a senior leader involved.

“It's really important to have somebody in a senior position who is going to sponsor it [wellbeing], support it, help advocate it, not because they want to tick the box, but because they're genuinely interested, they genuinely care about this stuff,” he says.

A good example of this at Labcorp is when a senior leader approached the HR team having heard about their efforts around employee wellbeing. Sawyer explains that they were really enthusiastic about what they were doing and wanted to get them involved with the management team meetings and to talk to the country managers.

“Straightaway it feels like we've jumped four steps forward. Rather than trying to push at this door, they've just come along and opened it,” says Sawyer. “They obviously see the value of their people being happy and healthy.”

Having senior leaders onboard enables momentum to be built around the wellbeing initiatives, and ensures that other managers are also engaged with what’s on offer. Sawyer explains that senior sponsors don’t necessarily have to be ‘the face’ of wellbeing, but by setting expectations in their own teams it helps to get to those who may not have previously engaged involved, and listening about the benefits of wellbeing.

“We found that when you get people into meetings, even the cynics can be turned quite quickly. Our wellbeing manager is able to reel off stats and data about the importance of this stuff. And you see people go: Okay, I didn't realise that was what mindfulness was about, or what resilience was about. It's about utilising senior leaders to get those doors open,” concludes Sawyer.

Regardless of how you structure your wellbeing benefits, having a standalone brand and senior support are two excellent ways to better engage your workforce with wellbeing.

The author is Dawn Lewis, content editor at REBA.