Healthcare benefits shouldn’t require a PhD to understand them or a scavenger hunt to find them.
Yet, that is the feeling many employees experience while navigating company benefits.
According to our recently released 2024 Insights Employee Health and Productivity Report, most employees have to use two to five websites or apps to gain access to their benefits, and only 24% of employers offer services to simplify this daunting process.”
This report, conducted by Ipsos among employers with 5,000 or more employees, reveals significant gaps in employees’ understanding and utilization of company-sponsored health programs.
When employees struggle to find the benefits they need, their health and productivity suffer.
They miss more workdays, have difficulty staying focused, and slowly lose commitment to the job. To make matters worse, the costs of their health care go up.
The survey also highlights that only 17% of employees strongly agree that their health plan communicates regularly to help them understand their benefits.
With over 40% of employees having to navigate these benefits on their own and only 17% feeling well-informed about their health benefits, it’s clear that employers need to act.
But how?
By understanding employees’ needs, employers can create solutions that enhance the productivity of their workforce and reduce healthcare costs.
In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to achieve this transformation, providing actionable insights and strategies to make benefits navigation easier and more effective for your employees.
But first, let’s consider two essential questions.
How Does Employee Health and Wellbeing Affect Productivity?
Health benefits confusion isn’t just an inconvenience for your employees—it’s a productivity disaster waiting to wreak havoc on your bottom line.
Here are five insights we discovered on how unclear health benefits are draining your company’s productivity:
- 69% of employees experience decreased enthusiasm: Enthusiastic employees drive innovation and high performance. When enthusiasm wanes, overall performance and work quality decline, leading to missed opportunities and slower progress.
- 55% have trouble focusing: Focused employees complete tasks efficiently and accurately. When focus diminishes, tasks take longer, errors increase, and team productivity suffers, delaying project completion.
- 28% have a decreased commitment to their employer: Employee commitment is crucial for retention and loyalty. Lower commitment leads to higher turnover rates, increasing recruitment and training costs, and destabilizing team cohesion.
- 8% are frequently absent: Frequent absences disrupt workflow and team dynamics. Delays in critical work occur, and the burden on present employees intensifies, causing decreased productivity.
- 7% frequently arrive later for meetings: Punctuality in meetings is essential for effective collaboration and decision-making. When employees are late, valuable time is wasted, slowing project momentum and hampering team efficiency.
Want to gain deeper insights into how these challenges affect health and productivity? Download the full report here.
Why Are Healthcare Benefits So Hard to Navigate?
To tackle these productivity issues, we must first understand why navigating healthcare benefits is challenging.
Here are a few key factors that contribute to this complexity:
Limited Awareness of Available Benefits
You have it all. Generous paid time off, remote work options, and professional development opportunities.
You offer world-class benefits that would make anyone want to work at your company.
Yet your employees still feel lost when it comes to understanding all the wonderful benefits your company offers. Or worse, they feel disconnected and unsupported .
Confusion about available benefits, low utilization of health programs, and frequent questions about benefits are common symptoms of this problem. As a result, employees’ health needs often go unmet, leading to decreased overall wellbeing. This disconnect increases absenteeism and healthcare costs for employees and the company.
Disjointed experiences
88% of employees have to go through 5 different websites to access their employer’s benefits.
Because employees spend so much excessive time navigating multiple platforms, they often give up out of frustration because they can’t find the information they need.
This wasted time reduces productivity and contributes to poor health management, increasing stress and healthcare costs.
Lack of Personalization
Employees crave personalized health support, yet only 17% say they get it from their plan.
Why is this such a big deal?
When employees’ unique needs aren’t addressed, they become dissatisfied and disengaged.
These experiences lead to low utilization rates, decreased satisfaction, and increased turnover.
What Can Employers Do to Make Their Benefits Navigation Easier?
Now that you know how the health and wellbeing of your employees affect their productivity and the various reasons why healthcare benefits are so hard to navigate, we can now talk about what employers can actively do to simplify this complex process.
Making benefits navigation easier is a two-pronged strategy.
Step 1: Understand the Needs of Your Population
Not all employee populations are created equally.
That’s why the first step in making your benefits easier to navigate is gaining a deep understanding of your employee’s unique needs and what they actually want from your company’s benefits package.
Assuming all employees have the same needs is a costly mistake.
This thinking often leads to generic benefits that don’t address anyone’s priorities effectively.
Imagine walking into your office where half the team is stressed out. Emma is battling headaches because her medication isn’t covered. Sam, who works from home, struggles with poor internet, but there’s no help in sight. Alex rushes through work, worried about his kids at home because the company doesn’t offer flexible hours. Each day, their frustration grows. They feel ignored, their needs unmet, and their morale drops. The company loses not just their trust but also their productivity. All because someone assumed one-size-fits-all benefits were enough.
To avoid this, take the time to learn what your employees want and craft a benefits package that meets those specific needs.
While we recommend that you do your research to identify the specific needs of your workforce, here are some insights from our survey on what employees expressed they wanted:
- Integrated offerings with interconnected benefits provide a holistic approach to employee well-being.
- Customized options that allow employees the flexibility to choose benefits that best suit their personal and family needs.
- Better communication strategies to ensure that information about benefits is clear, accessible, and engaging.
- More motivation for employees to take advantage of the benefits available to them, which can be achieved through incentives, awareness campaigns, and simplifying the enrollment process.
Step 2: Create a Better Benefits Experience
The second part of simplifying the benefits navigation experience requires employers to optimize their programs through the lens of four key actions that we call the Four Strategic Imperatives. The Strategic Imperatives are a roadmap to creating a seamless and personalized benefits navigation experience.
These four pillars are designed to engage employees effectively and help employers turn insights into tangible ROI:
- Connect the disconnected by integrating benefit platforms and information resources into a single, easy-to-navigate system.
- Design your benefits programs to engage by creating an engaging user experience that gives employees the tools and resources they need to explore, understand, and utilize their benefits.
- Reject one-size-fits-all by offering a range of options that cater to diverse needs, recognizing the uniqueness of each employee’s situation.
- Turn insights into ROI by continuously analyzing how benefits are used and appreciated. Use these findings to adapt offerings to maximize value for the company and its employees.
The path to happy employees and a healthy bottom line starts with The Four Strategic Imperatives.
What Does a Seamless and Personalized Healthcare Experience Look Like?
Now that you have a roadmap for making the necessary changes to improve navigation let’s explore what a seamless and personalized healthcare experience looks like.
This benefits navigation experience will inspire you as you prepare to design and optimize your own!
Make Benefits Work Better for Your Employees
Navigating healthcare benefits doesn’t have to be an insurmountable challenge
Employers can significantly enhance their benefits navigation process by clearly understanding employee needs and taking a strategic approach to meeting those needs. This will lead to more productive employees and a stronger bottom line.
The key to achieving these meaningful outcomes lies in integrating comprehensive strategies with action plans that address the complexities of the benefits landscape and the unique demands of your workforce.
We can help you do both.
At Personify Health, we’ve helped over 7,000 employers design and optimize their benefit programs so that their employees can understand and maximize the benefits available to them.
For further insights and actionable steps you can take, download the full report today.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you simplify your benefits navigation and unlock the full potential of your benefit programs.