Add value to your group risk and healthcare benefits
The UK health and risk market has become very large, with a lot of new entrants offering a wealth of health and wellbeing products.
More established providers now offer supplementary services to complement their core products, helping them to attract new business, often at no additional cost.
This can often pose a challenge for an in-house team with significant workloads who cannot undertake the level of research and due diligence required to obtain the most appropriate range of services and pricing.
Many value-added benefits are now available through core benefits, such as life assurance, income protection and private medical insurance (PMI).
This could include an employee assistance programme (EAP) or online GP which can cause confusion, particularly if the same benefit is offered through multiple service providers.
Enlisting the support of a specialist group risk and healthcare benefits adviser will help support employers through this maze, so they can:
- Offer innovative and suitable benefits - Clear and concise independent advice on the services and insurers that best suit your needs, removing the risk of uninsured losses or duplication of cover and associated costs.
- Reduce absence and maximise spend - Identify the most suitable claims and treatment pathways, maximising the employers return on benefit spend and enhancing employees experience and with the aim of reducing absence costs.
- Enhance not detract from core benefits - Highlighting where employee usage of any value-added benefit could impact core benefit costs. Moving core benefits due to costs could impact free services and can be challenging. Knowing all your options can help with decision making.
- Offer the best overall value - Obtain the most competitive pricing for clients, noting that the cheapest option may not be the best option. Obtaining value is always the key to an effective employee benefit solution.
- Achieve great benefit engagement - According to Group Risk Development (GRID), only 20% of employees have a very good understanding of their health and wellbeing benefits*. Focusing engagement on key benefits and using management information (MI) to understand usage can help justify benefit spend and increase take up.
- Obtain an independent review – Using an adviser to provide an independent recommendation and review of the market and providers will give reassurance, particularly where there is a recommendation to move to another benefit provider or change benefit levels.
Obtaining an independent review
Here’s few questions you should be asked as part of any review:
- What’s your budget? This might be zero, limited, cost neutral or a set amount which is available from your new company year. A review is likely to start with a fixed fee but with the view that future spend could be reduced or at the very least, would be spent on benefits which are both appropriate and valued.
- Improving a benefit offering could simply involve small changes or giving employees greater options.
- It may just include reorganising the benefit structure, for example moving to a master trust offering for group life (same benefit but reduced ongoing responsibility for employers on paying out benefits, as this sits with the master trust trustees). These changes can be small but help improve the overall benefit value for both employers and employees.
- What do you want to achieve? Are you willing to amend your benefits or even reduce the offering you have? What is driving the change – is it higher competitor benefits, employee feedback, rising costs? Are any of your current benefits contractual or can you make changes should cost or ongoing viability of a benefit be an issue? This is key to helping you understand next steps.
- When do you want to make the changes? Giving enough time to plan benefit amendments is important to allow time to communicate and factor this into future budgets. Are there any key milestones or other projects in place, to be aware of?
- Are you willing to rationalize your benefits? Rationalizing may include removing benefits and often starts with understanding how the benefit is used and valued, plus what is offered as a contractual right. The focus is not on reducing the benefit offering but making this more relevant for the workforce. This is often the case for pure voluntary benefits, where take up can be low.
- Can you commit resource to make changes? Any change to a benefit needs to be planned and decisions made well in advance of the renewal date, to allow for effective communication. This is particularly true for flexible benefits.
- Are you comfortable communicating benefit changes to your employees? Understanding how a benefit is used and valued is helpful in communicating changes you want to make. Setting out the review process and reasons for change can help, demonstrating this is an ongoing process and that benefit offerings should not be static but appropriate for the workforce and their changing needs.
We believe that collaborating with a specialist adviser to deliver a meaningful and valued employee benefits package can significantly boost employee engagement in a cost-effective and sustainable way.
This approach also enhances your employees' financial security, offering crucial support in challenging times.
In partnership with Barnett Waddingham
Everything we stand for at Barnett Waddingham is embedded in our promise – to do the right thing. We’ve applied this meaningful principle across all aspects of our business with continued success.
