Activating Employees to Use Your Employer MSK Benefit

Three concepts for a comprehensive approach

71% of employers say employees underutilize employee benefits.¹

That’s not good for the CFOs and HR directors who see benefits as a key way to attract and retain employees. It’s really not good for the vendors behind those benefits.

You can design the perfect benefit. You can check all the boxes brokers want checked. But if you can’t activate employees – if you can’t get them to use it, you’ve got nothing.

While there is no silver bullet for employee activation for benefits, we’ve taken the time to condense our learnings from customers, brokers, and industry leaders into best practices to inform how you approach this problem in the sales and servicing parts of your employer customer lifecycle.

A good place to start is with what causes and solves so many problems in life:

Communication (or lack of it.)

Employers struggle with benefits communication

"Beyond Benefits: Why Employee Benefits Engagement Is Vital To Your Business," a Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper commissioned by bswift, May 2023.

Many of the brokers I talk to are really focused on benefit design.

They’re into the bells and whistles. While I appreciate the insight and keeping up with the latest trends, I think the average employee is confused by it all.

It’s like the sales call where the rep spends all their time talking about feature/function – and loses the big picture. Eventually, you have to walk them back. “What is this? How do I use it? Why should I care? And how much is it going to cost me?”

Benefits communication is the same way.

Brokers will pull you into the sausage-making design of your benefit – and while it’s important – pushing yourself to build a relationship with the employer is key.

How will you empower them to get the most out of the benefit you’re providing? How will you co-design the communication around the benefit? And ultimately, how will you help them activate employees?

Three concepts for effective employee activation

Activating employees isn’t as simple as telling them about your benefit. It’s not just about them knowing where to go to use it. And it’s not solely dependent on incentivizing a certain behavior.

It’s all of that working together. That’s what makes for a well-rounded employee activation approach.

Let’s dig into each bucket.

Awareness

Communicating what it is, who it’s for, and when to use it at the right time and place.

Tips for building awareness:

• Have core educational assets ready to be used by the employer's benefits team.
• Work closely with HR to develop a multichannel communication approach.
• This is made easier by developing the relationship.
• An email isn't enough. One pagers, posters in the breakroom, lunch-and-learns, "clinic" days all work in your favor.
• Integrate into their existing workflow as much as possible.
• Understanding how employees engage in benefits today allows you to piggyback onto what’s already in motion — and find opportunities to go above and beyond.
• Is there an onsite clinic? Offer a meet-and-greet with the staff. Is there a contracted care navigation company? Educate them on the services.

A lack of awareness leads to:

• Employees not thinking about using the benefit.
• They end up going elsewhere for care (likely a higher cost site of care).
• The employer sees low activation, utilization, and ROI.

Incentive

What’s in it for the employee? (Exceptional care isn’t enough)

Tips for incentives:

• Offer financial incentives like reduced or zero-dollar copays.
• For big savings on high-ticket procedures, see if the employer will cut employees a check.
• Faster access - guarantee priority appointments, online triaging, or concierge services.
• Recognize team members using the benefit.

A lack of incentive leads to:

• Employees don’t see what’s in it for them.
• Your benefit seems more easily compared to other options.
• You generate less engagement and word of mouth which makes awareness harder and efforts more incremental.

Ability

The benefit has to be easy to find and use.

Tips for increasing ability:

• Have a digital hub that makes understanding and accessing each facet of your benefit easy.
• Integrate into the employer's HRIS benefits platform.
• These are growing in popularity. The Forester study mentioned earlier also found 73% of employers are investing in new employee benefits platforms.

Mercer Marsh Benefits technology 2023

• Make an FAQ document that answers questions employees may have.

Mercer ran an interesting survey. They found that benefits technology was closely correlated with a belief that their benefits meet their needs.

Employee activation tips specific to you

Establish baseline metrics.

Most self-funded employers will share their de-identified claims data with you. Dive deep into the numbers to analyze spend and utilization. Understand the starting point and get on the same side of the table in the process. Once you're looking at the problem from the same viewpoint, you’ll have a clear idea of where the opportunity areas are, and you can design your communication plan accordingly.

Do things that don’t scale.

You can go onsite with a surgeon, host a Q&A, or run a one-day clinic. Most other benefits providers can’t go to this level of local — but you’ve got a vested interest in building a community presence. The things that don’t scale get people talking, build relationships, and give you deep insight into your employer's customers.

Feedback is your friend.

You are not a national benefits provider. You’re nimble, and you’re local. Your ability to solicit and act on employee feedback will be faster than others in the employer's benefits stack — use that to your advantage. Employers are trying to listen to their team so they can truly understand what they want from their benefits. More than most, you’re positioned to make a difference on this front.

One final thought.

Employer relationships are a spectrum.

On one side, you have a general, mutual awareness. The employer knows about your business or even your new urgent care location. Any employee patients you see are by happenstance. The relationship gets more defined – more formal – as you move to the other side of the spectrum. You'll have more intentional engagements, like a lunch and learn, a one-day clinic, or a workers comp program. Keep going, and you get to tier-one provider status, and eventually the benefit-based relationship.

The goal is to keep moving toward that side of the spectrum.

As I've written extensively, I believe Going Direct is a key part of the ortho's sustainable growth strategy. As time passes, more and more of the ortho group's revenue will come from defined, formalized, benefits-based DTE relationships.

Employee activation will become a core competency of groups.

But have no fear! It's just a different flavor of marketing your team is already doing...

...But this flavor of marketing is to a captive audience. Nobody else will get the level of unfettered access to employees (short-term and long-term patients) as you will. The employer wants nothing more than for you to help them communicate and hammer home awareness of your benefit, to incentivize usage, and to make their employee's ability to find and use it really really really easy.

You'll have an unfair advantage. A comprehensive approach to employee activation is how you'll compete unfairly.

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