Three Things You Can Do Today To Improve Your Employee Benefits Strategy by Ryan Holloway
Thanks so much to Ross and the XM Performance crew for letting us share some insights into the often crazy, sometimes confusing, but always interesting employee benefits world. We’ve put together our top three actionable tips to help supercharge your group benefits approach.
Let’s get started!
Cough It Up
Spend $10 per employee and start a telemedicine program. No, not the same telemedicine program that is bundled with your health insurance that is tied to your health enrollment, you know, the one nobody uses. Nobody uses those programs because they get lost in all the health insurance mumbo jumbo and the only person that gets access to the providers is the enrollee on the medical plan. Forget that.
Spend $10 a month per employee and go direct with a telemedicine provider. Utilization will improve, claims will go down on your health insurance, and best of all, you get access for your employee and their family members for NO-COST over the phone doctor visits, 24-7-365. You can even do doctor visits through video. Feeling super generous or really want to be a cool boss? Do this for your part-time people too!
Know Your Claims Utilization
Go pull a copy of your health program’s claims utilization. If you are spending waaaaaay more in premium than what the insurance company is paying in claims, you need to consider restructuring. The Affordable Care Act came up with this one size (one price) fits all for individual and small businesses, but guess who loses in that scenario? Yep, you guessed it, the small and medium sized businesses who have low claims utilization and healthy employees.
There’s still a market that exists where you can be priced based on actual risk, not the losses of the insurance company for an entire region or state. If you want a competitive edge over your competition, look into this. Most small and medium sized business owners don’t even know they have access to claims data. If that’s you, shame on you and your agent. They should be giving you this info on a regular basis!
Engage Your Employees…Please?
Survey your employees! You might be spending a ton of time and money on employee benefits that your employees don’t even care about. Send out a survey and ask your employees what’s important to them. Enrollment/renewal season is coming up for most companies, don’t be the company wasting a ton of time and resources on programs that your employees don’t care about. Ask them what’s important, listen to their feedback, then plan for next year. Who knows, you might be able to drop a few things that they don’t care about that you thought they wanted. Need some help getting started? Click here for a free guide to engaging your employees.
Final Thought
Supercharge your employee benefits strategy! Follow our Facebook page for weekly videos that offer more group benefit tips, strategies and insights! You can also receive more strategies by subscribing to our Benefits Brainstorm vlog.
If you are curious about any of the strategies above, or would like more info, a friend of Ross’ is always a friend of mine (just not too many Army veterans please) so don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know how we can make your approach just a little more effective!
– Ryan Holloway (President at Holloway Benefit Concepts)