How To Provide Health Insurance That Your Employees Will Love

When it comes to employee benefits, innumerable studies have shown that employees value health benefits over all the other. Even Glassdoor’s research, ‘The Benefits Employees Want Most’ stated that health insurance had the highest correlation to employee satisfaction, as compared to other benefits in their package.

However, the key takeaway from the study was that employee satisfaction is all about getting the basics right. Benefits like health insurance, paid leaves and pension plans take the lead in the correlation with employee satisfaction. Clearly, ancillary benefits and fun perks cannot compensate for the long-term standard benefits. In simpler words, a TT table in the office and free food cannot make you cool enough to not provide employees with health insurance.

That being said, providing health insurance just for the sake of it cannot get your employee engagement and satisfaction. If that were the case, employees wouldn’t have been increasingly unhappy with their health benefits. The question to be addressed here is that what's lacking in the existing benefits plans? How can you provide health insurance that employees would actually love? The answer is simple: an employee-centric approach.

Traditional health insurance has set policies and benefits that have been in place since time immemorial. And it’s time for a change. Here are 5 tips that can actually help you provide health insurance that your employees will love:

Provide employees with holistic and convenient healthcare

What you need to realize is that healthcare costs today don’t just include hospital bills. Your employees need to consult doctors, buy meds, get tests done. More often than not, your employees incur mostly huge healthcare costs without really being hospitalized. Not just the cost, this healthcare is quite cumbersome for them to manage and access.

So, your health benefits plan needs to make healthcare accessible to your employees and is covered in their insurance to make them love it. You need to find plans that include online consultation, OPD care, easy diagnostic solutions like sample collection from home, and even annual health checkups. These not only make your health insurance cover more holistic but also convey that you care for your employees' wellbeing.

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Find plans that allow customization

A young employee might need maternal and newborn care coverage in their health insurance. On the other hand, an experienced employee might want to cover their pre-existing options. To cater to both these segments, you should find plans that employees can customize based on their requirements.

Further, you can also go for plans that provide personalized recommendations using your employee data for your employees to find relevant doctors, hospitals and diagnostic centres for them.

Employees love tech-friendly health insurance

In the post-digital era, everybody wants to access information at their fingertips. Your employees’ discontent with health insurance begins at enrollment wherein they’ve to do length paperwork to get their coverage. Their dissatisfaction with your health plans increases when they’ve to spend hours with customer care trying to understand their claim process and get their claim. This can be overcome if you choose plans from a provider that makes the entire experience digital.

For instance, at Plum health insurance, we’ve prepared our mobile and desktop app that allows easy online enrollment and guided claims for your employees and they love it.

Check your plan's network to match your employees’ needs

Before deciding on any health insurance plan, you must always check out their partner networks i.e. hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic centers that are covered in the plan for:

• Cashless Treatment: Imagine a situation where your employee needs emergency surgery but the hospital is not in the partner networks of the insurance provider. In that case, the employee would first have to pay for the surgery and later get reimbursed for it. For young employees, this becomes a concern as they may not have enough savings to pay for the surgery. So, ensure that the good hospitals in the city you operate covered in the plan for cashless treatment. This can make the experience much hassle-free for your employees.
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• Setting adequate room rent limits: You also need to look at the network of your plans and tally them with the hospitals your employees often visit or are accessible to them. Then, you should check the average cost of rooms at these hospitals and decide on room rent limits accordingly. Here’s a guide to help you set adequate room rent and ICU limits in your employee insurance plans

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Ensure that there’s enough insurance awareness

Employees aren’t able to make use of their plans because the health insurance concepts are too complicated for them to comprehend. This becomes a strong reason for their frustration. Due to a lack of awareness about the insurance jargons, and the processes they need to follow to avail their benefits, they end up feeling that the plans are not really useful for them.

Lack of awareness leads to:

• No knowledge of out-of-pocket medical costs.
• Inadequate choices for treatment or delayed treatment.
• The belief that their employer offers substandard health plans.
• More rejected claims due to incorrect policy interpretations and confusion.
• Mistakes in enrollment leading to improper coverage or even loss of coverage.

This is where you can foster health literacy for your employees. Regularly convey their benefits and how to avail them through emails and other communication channels at your companies. Additionally, choose your health partner wise. This way, they can do the awareness for you and help in clarifying your employees’ doubts. For instance, at Plum, we’ve set up 24X7 Live chat support for your employees and guided claims and enrollment services to help them out.

In The End

It’ll be a futile practice to set up health insurance and benefits for your employees that they’re either not aware of or are not able to conveniently navigate through and access. Your money and efforts will go down the drain. Not just that, you’d incur additional HR costs due to low employee engagement which would eventually lead to high attrition rates. So, always choose a plan that helps in bridging the gap between your employees’ healthcare needs and healthcare costs. We’d recommend conducting an initial internal survey with your employees to understand what kind of health benefits they’re looking at before choosing a plan for them.