Great Health Insurance Grows Great Employee Engagement
For many companies, health plans are a required benefit. Which begs the question, if it’s required, is it still a benefit?
The answer is, yes it is, if you choose a plan wisely and with the best interests of your employees in mind.
Two Ways to Approach Health Insurance
Some companies approach their benefits plan with one factor in mind: cost. They purchase the cheapest benefits packages on the market. You know the ones, health benefits that meet the minimum requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
The second, more efficient, approach is to buy benefits packages that deliver value to employees. If you can offer a valuable plan, this will not only increase employee engagement and health, but it will help morale and productivity.
How well do you think companies with poor health benefits do, when it comes to recruiting and retention?
Here Are The Numbers
A survey conducted by Quantum Workplace, and highlighted by the Society of Human Resource Management, showed there are significant differences between employees who have a robust health plans and others offering lower quality ones.
- Employees who believe their companies care about their health are 38% more engaged. Clearly, confidence in a health care plan plays a role in employee morale.
- These same employees are also 10 times less likely to be hostile to the company.
Those are some good statistics for the big picture, but how do you get individuals to respond to a good health care plan?
Communications and Understanding Health Insurance
Ask yourself, how much do you know about your health plan? Do you know the co-pay, or what you pay if you have to go to the emergency room?
How do you go about using it? What if you are out of state or the country?
Interestingly, almost 13% of employees said they don’t know what benefits their health plan offers, or how to use the benefits. This lack of knowledge or communication also caused them to be 20% less engaged.
The answer to this problem is simple, you must advertise your health plan like you would your product.
You need to let people know it exists, and how to use it. Begin by communicating across all channels:
- employee pages of your website
- company e-mails
- texts
- employee social media
Whatever you have available to you.
Next, you have to provide regular periods of training for your employees. This can be during your annual or semi-annual training day. Or, and a lot more fun, host an employee day or a health fair.
Arrange for a representative from your healthcare company or your broker to attend and teach people about all the benefits of the health plan.
The good news is once your employees are aware of, and comfortable with, your employee benefits plan, they are far more likely to be engaged and productive.
Flagler Financial is an insurance broker specializing in business benefits plans and packages. If you would like to know how we can help your company, we invited you to contact us for a free consultation.