How Can We Be Better Employee Benefits Professionals?

Shawna M. Oliver, AVP, Head of Global Benefits & Wellness, Manulife

Shawna M. Oliver, AVP, Head of Global Benefits & Wellness, Manulife

Being a leader in the employee benefits space is a privilege. I get the opportunity to work every day with an extraordinarily talented team. We live our company values – We think big.Do the right thing.Own our issues and get it done together. And we work in an industry where advances in medicine, innovative technology and new employer benefits are emerging daily. In an era where benefit satisfaction drives employee engagement, company loyalty and job performance, it is time for our industry to shine. We all agree employees are our biggest assets, and there is no better time to support them than now.

We’ve come a long way. There was a time when covering fertility benefits was unheard of; costs for one case could easily be more than six figures. Today, it's standard, whether through dollar limits or cycles and sometimes with concierge solutions to help guide and navigate. Mental health benefits used to be an employee assistance program. Today, there are multiple options, from digital solutions to asynchronous texts, life coaching, and even the ability to meet with a therapist the next day. Cancer solutions have evolved from always a set treatment for a specific type of cancer to doing genotype-based diagnosisearly-detection screenings and genetic marker testing to create personalized treatment protocols. Provider networks are evolving. Our awareness of the necessity of culturally competent networks continues to emerge, and intentional inclusion is being made so patients can seek treatment from someone who looks like them and understands their lived experience.

Allthese examples – and many others – are great. But can we do better? In a world where our employees walk through their virtual or brick-and-mortar doors every day to support our corporate missions, we challenge ourselves to say, “Is this benefit really a benefit?” If the benefit causes an employee to be distracted from their job at hand, the computer in front of them, or the customer they are serving, is it working as it’s intended?

The industry has imposedlimitations, annual allowances, lifetime allowances, cycle maximumsand visitlimits on so many benefits. The industry is required to cover preventive health at no cost, but most employer-sponsored health plansinclude cost-sharing for mental health visits, suggesting your physical health is important, but your mental health is not so much. There are pre-authorizations, treatments to be tried first, step therapies, mandatory generics, and all types of programs to address cost containment within a program. Yet all of these come at a cost. The cost to the employee. At a time when the employee’s best interest is to focus on the treatment or understand their condition, they are stressed out trying to understand treatment limits, cost-sharing requirements, or just navigating the complex healthcare system. Are the dollars saved really worth the time lost? What about the employees who avoid treatments altogether, given the complexity of the programs we've built?

I get it. We all have costs to contain and budgets to manage. It’s prudent to do so, and our fiduciary responsibility. But ask yourself, if you've ever gone through fertility treatment and had limitations imposed, did it stress you out – and do you think you could do better by your employees? Have you ever needed mental health help and felt you couldn’t afford it, or find it, or didn’t seek it out because the three, six or nine visits just didn’t seem enough, so you gave up? Have you ever planned a medical appointment and then encountered a benefit maximum or found yourself lost in the land of approvals? Your employees likely have. During a time when you wanted them focused on the job in front of them. Shouldn’t we be looking at benefit costs from a more holistic perspective? Cannot a greater investment in medical benefits today save us from higher costs of delayed care tomorrow? Cannot a greater investment in mental health today save us in disability costs tomorrow? Cannot a greater investment in all benefits today save us recruiting, training, and intellectual capital costs tomorrow?

As an industry, we can do better. We can develop solutions without complicated rules,limitations, maximums, caps, address equity and inclusion, and provide access to the latest medical tools and technology. As employee benefits professionals, we can do better.We can be fierce advocates for those employees we represent, demonstrating why investing in benefits and removing cost barriers are the right investments. As leaders, we can do better. We need to educate others on how benefit dollars have returned in retention and engagement. And as humans, we can do better. We can fight for the next person, the next partner, and the next family to make sure their experience is better than the last.

Healthcare