Research Session–Igniting Your Benefits Strategy

This survey of HR leaders and benefits decision-makers will focus on best practices for benefits planning, benefits communication strategies, open enrollment and more. The results will provide benefits leaders with peer-based insights on how to maximize employee engagement and utilization of their benefits portfolio.

Transcription:

Kerry Gross (00:11):

Welcome, I'm sure all of you have been here for a couple of great days of sessions. I'm Kerry Gross, Director of Research Intelligence at Arizent, which is the parent company to Employee Benefit News and the Benefits at Work conference. And I'm so excited to talk here today with Sarah Mann if you want to introduce yourself.

Sarah Mann (00:29):

Hi everyone, I'm Sarah. I work on the small yet Mighty People operations team at calm. Some of you may have already talked to my wonderful colleagues in the back from Calm Business. Hi, and I've been at Calm for almost three years. We just had our benefits renewal meeting on Monday. So deep in decisions, I know we're all busy season and super excited to be with Kerry and to learn more and share a few best practices I hope.

Kerry Gross (00:56):

Yeah, thanks everyone. What we'll be talking about today is igniting your benefits strategy, which is a piece of research that we at Arizent did recently. And for folks who are interested in learning more in this research as we go along, there's an long form report that's just got published today on EBN about this same topic with a lot more of the data that we'll be sharing today. So if you're interested, head over to EBN and check out the research reports, the igniting your benefit strategy research will be up there. But before you do that, we'd love to share some of the highlights with you today here. So first what we have is who we talk to. And so this was a piece of research where we talked to 150 benefits decision makers at organizations like many of yours in the audience. We see on the left-hand side of this slide, the major industries who responded to this survey. And this reflects kind of the major industries in the US that all of you probably know or at least know, companies that sit in these spaces.

(01:57)

And then on the right hand side a little bit about who we talked to, all of the benefits decision makers had to have responsibility for benefits, employee wellness or total rewards and 60% are director level or higher. So high level insights really understanding what these businesses are doing for their benefits strategy. And down at the bottom of the slide we see kind of size breakdown. 80% have more than a hundred full-time employees, 52% have more than 500 full-time employees. So taken altogether, these benefits decision makers really reflect the suite of companies which are in the US and I think we have great insights to share with you about the benefits decisions that people are making. And so without further ado, we'll jump into some of the insights we have to share with you. First we really wanted to understand what are the sorts of challenges or priorities for benefits decision makers in the next 12 to 18 months.

(02:47)

Perhaps those of you in the audience who are benefits decision makers, some of these resonate with you. And what we saw, we had folks rank all of these priorities against each other. And what we see is that finding cost benefits, savings is the number one priority that people are focused on, which that makes sense. And in most surveys we do, cost comes up to the top. But what I think is really interesting is the things that come up secondary in this list, improving benefits, communication, education, increasing utilization of preventative care and chronic illness. Looks like the label got cut off there, but that's for increasing utilization of primary care support. And then third, increasing benefits utilization. And I think these three all cluster together around benefits, communication and utilization. But I'd love your thoughts, Sarah, on what you're seeing on the top priorities that have come up here.

Sarah Mann (03:37):

Yeah, for sure. Obviously echoing the benefits, cost savings, I know a lot of people are always focusing on that, but especially after the past few years and kind of the market that we're in today, interestingly enough at Calm, we are even resetting a bit of how we're going to communicate our benefits this year. So we're usually pretty solid with great FAQs, obviously all the materials from our brokers, but we are a remote first company, so we are nearly 400 people, but we're across 35 states. We have a small amount of people in the UK and out of our recent culture survey, we actually found that a lot of employees were like, Hey, kind of don't know where to go for information or I went to go try and find something really specific with care that I was seeking and I just didn't know where to start.

(04:22)

So we are even refocusing on really making sure that we are getting that ongoing conversation going again this year and really making sure we're making these resources available to our employees in various different ways, but obviously excited to hear more and learn from anyone in this room afterwards as well.

Kerry Gross (04:38):

Yeah, and digging into that benefits utilization, driving utilization strategies as a core focus of this piece of research. And we really wanted to understand where benefits professionals perhaps like you all in the audience see their organization in terms of driving benefits utilization here. We asked this on a five point scale, which we see the question was just how effective do you feel your organization is at driving benefits utilization? And we see just 7% of benefits professionals saying that they feel extremely effective, 24% saying very effective. So about a third saying they're extremely or very effective, but the most benefits professionals saying that their company is somewhat effective at driving utilization.

(05:19)

And then another about a quarter saying not very effective or not at all effective. And what I think is really interesting, we'll use these splits throughout to see what are the organizations that are leading that are having the most effectiveness that they're driving, their benefits utilization. Are they taking different strategies than organizations that say they're just somewhat effective or not very at all effective? And we'll see as we move forward that there are some differences in benefits utilization and our hope is that away from this session you can take some ideas for what's the next step if I'm somewhat effective, what's the next step I can take to move towards more utilization or more effective utilization? And so in that vein, we asked first what strategies are organizations? And this question was in total, what are the strategies that you're using to drive benefits utilization?

(06:10)

And folks could select as many of these as they are using at the organization. We see number one, 52% of organizations are using communications or materials from their benefits broker advisor to educate employees, followed by 42% are providing employees with direct access to a benefits advisor and 38% are working with a financial advisor to implement or manage their 401K plans. And Sarah, I know you obviously drive utilization at your organization too, and I'd love your thoughts on what are coming up top and what do you think are kind of best practices around that.

Sarah Mann (06:45):

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, kind of going in deeper a bit around what we tend to do. I think as mentioned with open enrollment, we use new front for our brokers. They're terrific partners and they obviously send us the benefits packets. They really help with a lot of communication. But we actually made a lot of changes a couple of plan years ago to get into more national providers really kind of getting set up for a bit of scale, which came with a lot of changes and a lot of questions that came up.

(07:11)

So we really do provide deep FAQs available to our employees even for maybe some early career folks, what's a deductible? What's out of pocket? What are all these terms and what does this mean? And we really try and educate our employees even from a basic level and then how that can help with their decisions with plans. One thing we have found really helpful specifically during open enrollment is we are not a heavy email company, so we actually create an open enrollment Slack channel if you all use Microsoft Teams. And we actually found that people learn from each other a lot of times they get a lot of questions answered, they're able to discuss a lot and learn from each other as employees. And then of course my team is really great on the, well, what about me? What's in it for me? Or this is a specific situation and we really do try and provide that one-on-one time specifically from a comm business perspective, just for perspective, we have 10 million employees as part of Comm business that's across 3,500 plus organizations.

(08:09)

And we actually, I'm actually curious, show of hands, I'm sure who is a benefits person of one on a small HR team of five and under or just literally an HR person of one. Okay, a lot of you superheroes. Cool. So we actually in Comm business will provide monthly engagement templates. They can link into cultural events that are going on or even be focused specifically on what might be going in on the organization. And especially those smaller HR teams have really found that helpful just to increase engagement. But that's a really nice segue to include other information around some of your other benefits, your AP and just a really consistent communication channel to share more of what employees have available to them.

Kerry Gross (08:53):

I love those ideas. The piece around Team Slack, we were talking about this earlier and how often we learn things from each other and our peers and to have a communication place where it has an HR person who's reading through stuff but it's peer to peer and where that feedback back to hr, what are the actual problems that some of our employees are having?

(09:13)

That's such a great idea. And obviously the communication strategies ties right in with the top strategy that people are doing, right? HR folks in the audience, you're busy, your lives are busy. And so being able to lean on someone who can help with those communication strategies and best practices and stuff, that seems so valuable. And related to that and related to communication strategies, if we tie together the last slide where we talked about the organizations that are most effective in driving benefits utilization with this data here we pulled out some areas where organizations that are most effective at driving utilization are doing some slightly different actions than other organizations. So just to orient folks to this chart, the dark blue is the folks who say that their company is extremely or very effective at driving benefits utilization. The purple the middle line is those who say somewhat effective and then that teal is not very not at all effective.

(10:12)

And we clearly see that the dark bar and the purple bar in the middle are pulling towards all of these actions more frequently than organizations that aren't effective at driving utilization. So folks in the audience, if you say, Ooh, we're not very good at driving utilization, maybe any of these steps would be a good step. And feel free, you can take pictures if you want. Some of this data meant to say that at the beginning and don't be shy, but in particular if you see there are two areas where the darkest bar is at the top and driving more frequently than even somewhat effective. The second one down customizing benefits website portal or app based on each employee's unique needs or profile. And then the fourth one down, offering a concierge or health advocate as a central point of contact to personalize employee care. And what I see in those options where the organizations that are most effective at driving utilization is around personalization.

(11:04)

And I'd love your thoughts, Sarah, around, we hear a lot about personalization, but why is that important and how do you do that in the HR space?

Sarah Mann (11:13):

It's a great question and something that I know me and my team struggle with all the time. I think I've already shared a bit around what we try and do it calm to personalize it. I think the thing that outside of all of this stuff, we also switch 401K plans next year. We need to do more around financial wellness this year. And again, really getting better at repetition and continuing the education around what's available in terms of that concierge. One reason we really love our brokers is they have a dedicated one place go-to one-stop place for our employees to ask questions. Maybe sometimes they don't want to come directly to our team. We do all know each other.

(11:50)

We're a smaller team, but we also get a lot of feedback around what they're hearing and where we can maybe get ahead of some of the questions received. But also too, I think our team is really focused on responding quickly, really helping guide people through hopping on a Zoom, not getting caught in Slack or get caught in messaging to really help people based on what's going on and following up with any needs they have there. And then one other actual calm business example I wanted to give, I had the pleasure of attending an LA Roadshow last week where I got to meet some clients and prospects that had been a while. So that was fun for me. It was actually shared through the Calm Business dashboard. They noticed a spike in a negative mood sentiment throughout a period of time. They noticed that there was a lot more stress or kind of sleep content being used within the dashboard and they really saw a very clear correlation to some changes that were going on in the organization as well as performance review season, which we all know can be super fun.

(12:47)

So they were able to actually use a calm business pathway, essentially a program where all employees can use around sleep and really to help manage that stress and they had some really great engagement in it. So I think there is a matter of having all of these available for personal questions that might come up or we know lifecycle things come up or even revisiting how we can support people through parental leave and making all of our experience more personal, but also from a company perspective what might be going on to really help drive engagement and really to help employees feel better overall.

Kerry Gross (13:17):

And that's a great example of real live time data. We talk about analyzing benefits data and how does that change what we're doing? And that's a real way to see strategically we see this happening around this time of year, here's how we're going to address it.

(13:30)

And that kind of communication around that is a great segue into we wanted to understand how organizations are communicating with their employees about benefits and what we see 80% of organizations are using email. And that's I'm sure not shocking to folks. I get lots of emails about various different things in my inbox as well. But what we saw in the data is also that organizations that are more effective at driving benefits utilization are using some of these other strategies. I think reminders in your benefits portal is kind of intuitive, but I'd love your thought, Sarah on some of these other actions that organizations can be taking as we maybe step away from email or add to email to drive better utilization. What does that look like and what can folks be thinking about?

Sarah Mann (14:18):

Yeah, sure. So again, I know I mentioned email can be really tough I think for a lot of organizations.

(14:23)

So as much as you can communicate through various channels will really be important. I think one thing which is of course organic to the type of company calm is, but obviously mental health and mindfulness is a huge, it's critical to us. It's what we do, it's what we're trying to solve for. And there are little things that we'll do where 10:00 AM PST, every day people can hop on, do one of our daily meditations together before any all hands, any town halls, we all take a moment to breathe and really meditate together. But I think what that really leads us into even more is any stressful event that comes up the hurricane that just hit the South, we try and personalize check in with people. We do posts when a lot is going on in the world. We try and be cognizant of and proactive around when times are employees might be struggling.

(15:09)

So anytime we communicate and our leaders send out that information, we take advantage of that. Here's our EAP. If you're a Sigma member, again, here's the phone number. And we really try and push out resources in every opportunity that we can, especially in communications that come from our leaders during a time when that's really needed. I think one final calm business example I really wanted to give that fit in well here is that I just learned about, which I thought was really cool. So our team will partner with customers and do a lot of roadshows whether it's on campus, but the Greater Toronto Airport Authority did something really neat. So we know every company will have different workforce. I was just talking to Abby, she worked in the restaurant business for a long time. It's just every industry has such a different workforce and a lot of people aren't also checking email.

(15:56)

They aren't on Slack all day, they aren't on Zoom, they are out walking around. And so we partnered with the customer to provide swag, be in the airport, catch up with employees, check in on how they're doing and really show them how they can utilize the app. And then they had information around all of their benefits offerings as part of that. So just a really kind of unique way to catch people when they're on the go who also may not be available all the time through different and kind of more standard communication channels I should say.

Kerry Gross (16:23):

And I think what I hear in all of those examples, it's in touchpoints from your leaders. It's at a booth where you're actually meeting people, it's meeting employees where they're at. Then that seems like kind of a theme across a lot of this is if you want to drive an individual's utilization of something, you have to meet them at the moment and time when they need it.

(16:43)

It's when hurricane is coming through, what are my resources and thinking about not just, I'm sure lots of you work for companies that have customer facing items and you think a lot about your customer's journey and I think there's a parallel for that for utilization about your employee's journey, when is the moment at which they need to intersect with whatever service they need. And one of those services that lots of employees need is around preventative care. And so we asked what methods are these benefits professionals using to drive preventative care? This was again, multi-select question. They could select as many as they are doing. And what we see, number one is that 50% of organizations are offering access to virtual care, 39% are bringing screening or vaccination services on site and 34% are providing paid time off for appointments, screening, et cetera. These are all great strategies I think for driving preventative care utilization, but I'd love your thought, Sarah, on digital care and where that fits in the preventative landscape now.

Sarah Mann (17:50):

Yeah, absolutely. I think, I know I mentioned we made some big changes to our benefits offering a plan years ago, and a huge piece for us was of course the employee experience and accessibility around it and digital was a huge piece of that. Given we are remote first and with healthcare costs so high, we also try and just reinforce those annual preventative care things that everyone should be doing. I'm overdue for the dentist, I hear it all the time. But we really try to then even take it a step further. Obviously preventative mental health is a huge thing for us. A lot of money savings that can be there both also from a workforce productivity, but in general there's digital tools including the call app, but even the carriers that we partner with, making sure they're mobile friendly, making sure they offer virtual care, making sure there's a lot of ease.

(18:42)

And we are also revisiting how we can push those reminders out not only through open enrollment but throughout the year. So everything's more accessible. People don't have to leave the house to do what they need to do. They can hop on real quick, take care of themselves. And we're really thinking through also how we can take that to the next level for all preventative care, not just kind of those annual things and checkups that people will need. And we obviously are lucky to be able to dog food, a lot of our products and resources that help with sleep and a lot of things that can kind of impact other conditions. But really pushing our carriers on this and really making sure our plans are set up well is a small thing. But it really has been helpful and we've seen a lot of online engagement.

Kerry Gross (19:21):

And that I think matches what we've been talking about too, is meeting people where they're at, communicating with what they need when they need.

(19:30)

And we also split this question by effectiveness at driving benefits utilization. What I think is really interesting here, we see in that top line offering access to virtual care, we see organizations that are somewhat effective at driving utilization are spiking there. And I think it's a great step to offer access to virtual care, but what we see is that extremely effective organizations are also doing other things. And so I think that access to virtual care is a step, but it's not a panacea, right? It's not the only thing that we should be doing. And there are a couple of other things popping up here as strategies for more successful organizations are more effective at driving utilization. Things like offering access to digital self-care tools, offering employees monetary incentives, providing access to onsite primary care. And you can see a couple of other differences here, but I'd love your thoughts, Sarah, on that spread of strategies that are available.

Sarah Mann (20:28):

Yeah, again, I think it just keeps going down to communication. I think you say it will carry meeting people where they're at, making sure that you're meeting the needs of the employees and really providing that care, whether it's digital or even onsite or taking advantage of other things going out the company to really share that. I think one thing that we get to do very easy, obviously being calm, is we do get to gamify a lot of this work, especially preventative benefits, offering a sleep challenge during sleep awareness week. There's so much that you can play with regardless of the type of resources that you have, and really talk to your brokers on what might be available there. The reason I say that, which I haven't mentioned yet, is we are even lucky that a lot of our health plans offer so many other resources and that changes every year.

(21:15)

So we actually have had our brokers come on throughout the year that we record, we make available so people can access it anytime. And they go in deeply of like, Hey, did you know that the Cigna plan offers X, Y, Z? If you're experiencing this, these might be a few opportunities for you in addition to calm and what you already have on site here. So that's something that we found really helpful too, is bringing our brokers back in, not just for open enrollment, but really talking through even bringing in people from the carriers to speak through all the things that are available to them. So that's another strategy that we've found helpful in the past.

Kerry Gross (21:46):

And that's a piece of data which we didn't include in this presentation just for the sake of time, but around year-round communication and how important it is that if you're just communicating around open enrollment, then that's just one touch point.

(21:58)

But if you're communicating all the time and bringing it to the top of mind, you mentioned having reminders and I know that I personally need reminders. It would be great if someone knocked on my door and was like, Hey, go to the dentist. Have you made that appointment for the dentist? Right? Those sorts of reminders too I think are really helpful.

Sarah Mann (22:18):

Come knock on my door or remind me because the, don't remind me.

Kerry Gross (22:21):

 I don't mind being reminded.

Sarah Mann (22:22):

Yeah. And one thing too, Kerry, quickly is we all know anything digital, we'll do those reminders for you. It will be that digital virtual knock on your door. And that's something I think that's really helpful and with preventative care, a lot of success with just reminding you, Hey, take a breath. Hey, it is time to go to the dentist. And that's something that I think that's really helpful outside of a call from your doctors that just sits in your voice mailbox.

Kerry Gross (22:45):

Totally. And my doctor has become pesky and they text now the automated, which comes back to the automated kind of reminders

Sarah Mann (22:53):

And then they send you the surveys and feedback about your doctor visit. Really follow up. Exactly.

Kerry Gross (23:00):

But we wanted to round out this survey to acknowledge that there are still challenges, right? All of you who are sitting in the audience who are in HR are still facing challenges. And we asked this as an open-ended question, what's the biggest challenge for you in building a benefit strategy? And we coded those responses here, but we see above heads and tails cost and budget. And that reworks us back to the top and the priorities, right? We saw cost and budget coming in, but we also see on this list meeting the diverse needs of the workforce communication education, which is a lot of what we've been talking about, this whole presentation and making the right selections.

(23:35)

And I'd just love your thoughts, Sarah, for folks who are in the audience who are facing some of these challenges, what tips do you have? What thoughts do you have?

Sarah Mann (23:44):

I'm with you. I'd also love to hear all of your tips as well. No, definitely face these challenges. I think we see a workforce changing every day. Gen Z coming into the workforce adds a whole other piece to it, and it is so hard with benefits. I think one thing I didn't really speak to is with having to find cost savings, especially this year with the rising costs, it's really hard to find that balance of optimizing for your company while optimizing for as many employees as you possibly can. And so at Calm, it's like while we would love to have and give our employees everything that they're asking for, we really are looking at the data.

(24:23)

We're getting feedback to make sure that we are optimizing for as many people as possible, impacting and making sure there is care for as many of our employees as possible. And I think where we really push to is leadership buy-in, again, being a mental health company, we have leaders who are very open around things that they struggle with, but that then leads into them being able to speak naturally for the benefits and us really being able to show them how the benefits that we are paying for can really impact preventative care or even take care of our employees altogether. And then I think the other piece too is we try things out and we're honest about that. Kerry and I, were just talking about this a bit. This is a year where as a company, based on the decisions we make, we are going to be super honest and transparent with our employees.

(25:08)

We're lucky that we're able to offer great benefits. Do we have new benefits that we'll offer a lot of bells and whistles this year? No, it's been a tough year for a lot of companies. And one thing we're really focused on is just being transparent about it and more speaking to the long-term strategy that we may be able to have based on the revenue that comes in based on how we're going to grow. And we found that's been really helpful. We've really tried to go from just, Hey, here are your plans. Oh, yep. We're not offering this year, sorry. Or it's too expensive. We're trying to share more around our story and what we're trying to build towards. And that's going to be a lot of our messaging this year for sure.

Kerry Gross (25:41):

And I think too, our conversation around this is as employees to see the decision making behind things shows you what the culture behind the organization is, right?

(25:50)

Why are we picking this benefit over this benefit? What is the community that we're building and how are we making choices for all of us together? And I think that that's such a valuable thing that you give to your employees when you communicate fully about benefits or about anything that they have access to. And that's everything that we have time for today. I'm sure if you have questions, both Sarah and I are available. We'll be probably wandering over to the calm booth, which is at 104. I want to thank everyone and remind you that if you want to see more of this data, you can go to the long form report, which is on the EBN website. And it was great to talk with you, Sarah. Is there anything else you want to add?

Sarah Mann (26:30):

No, that's it. Yeah. Come say hello and yeah, Thanks for the time everyone. Thanks everyone.