Three questions to ask your health and wellbeing benefits provider
But, with so many options on offer for supporting employee health and wellbeing, how can you be sure you are choosing the right initiative and the right provider? Here are three questions you should be asking any health and wellbeing benefits provider before investing your carefully planned resources.
1. How can you help us achieve our HR priorities?
As pay budgets remain tight, and pressure to retain talent continues, curating an attractive employee deal is important for any organisation. Employee benefits are a great way to enhance the package and finding a health and wellbeing offering is high on the agenda for many HR professionals.
Alongside retaining talent, 46 per cent of employers cite reducing absence as a top priority2 and 40 per cent want to increase the number of benefits they offer to staff2. Research shows that health cash plans are one of the top three benefits that help to manage absence, retain employees and enhance employee engagement, with a total perceived value of 87 per cent among employers1.
A provider should listen to your priorities and challenges, and make sure that their health and wellbeing offering is aligned to this; whether it’s reducing absence or supporting mental wellbeing for employees.
2. How can you help our organisation see the most value from the benefit?
When choosing their employee benefits, the most important consideration for almost half (45 per cent) of employers is receiving value for money on their scheme1. Measuring the return on investment is the best way to identify this. However, just 35 per cent currently measure the financial return on investment of their employee benefits package1.
A good benefits provider will work with you to share insight into performance of the benefit. This could be management information on the number of employees signing up to the benefit, how much the benefit is being used, or feedback around the employee experience.
Your provider should also help you identify key performance measures that can be put in place before introducing the benefit, and can be re-visited to evaluate scheme success. Read our industry insight into measuring benefits ROI for ideas of measures you could use.
3. How will you help us communicate the benefit to our employees?
Once you have chosen the right benefit and implemented it, arguably the most important step is getting employees engaged with it. Without buy-in from employees, your benefit won’t work to best effect. Interestingly, 56 per cent of organisations communicate with staff about their employee benefits on a less than quarterly basis1.
To give your benefit the best chance of getting off the ground, your provider should help you communicate with everyone in the business about the benefit and how it can support employees in their everyday life.
Good providers will also be able to share a toolkit of marketing materials with you to drive engagement with the benefit. Often these tools will be related to national campaigns, which can help you to really gain traction with your benefits communications.
This article is provided by Simplyhealth.
References
1. Corporate Decision Makers online survey, February 2017, sample of 512 people responsible for or involved in approving the employee benefits package within a company
2. Corporate Decision Makers online survey, February 2017, sample of 512 people responsible for or involved in approving the employee benefits package within a company, when asked to rank their top three priorities from certain benefits
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