Benefits Business
HR execs tune into strategies
addressing employee productivity
Employers show increased interest in elder care,
employee assistance programs and wellness benefits
By Len Strazewski
Money talks when you are working directly with a chief executive officer or chief financial officer, but when you are discussing the role of employee benefits with human resource executives, you need to discuss more than the bottom line of the cost of health care and other benefits.
Recruitment, retention and, lately, productivity, are the key concerns of human resource executives, and an employee benefits strategy that can play a role in generating a productive work force will get more attention than a spreadsheet analyzing the latest health premium increase.
Employee benefits have always been a key component in recruitment and retention strategies. Prospective employees always want to know their salary, but they ask about their benefits as well, particularly in an era of high consumer health care costs and an increasing number of uninsured workers. Employees with families think twice about changing jobs if it would mean losing health or retirement benefits or creating an awkward transition from one health provider network to another.
That’s not likely to change. Even as the presidential candidates debate their own plans to provide coverage for more of the uninsured and promote universal access to care, they are relying on a backbone of employer-based health benefits.
Productivity is a more complicated concern. While the major medical portion of health benefits is designed to help employees when they are ill and to get them back to work when they are better, the core benefits of most health plans don’t generally focus on productivity issues.
However, there are ancillary benefits that can support human resource strategies to improve productivity, and agents who introduce them to their clients may find a whole new way to win their status as trusted advisor. Specifically, here are three employee benefits that agents can bring to the table that address productivity issues as well as employee health: elder care benefits and referrals, employee assistance programs (EAPs), and wellness benefits.
Elder and dependent care
Elder and dependent care has become an increasing employer concern as studies identify the strains on employees who have to provide care for elders or dependents, as well as the resulting financial drain on employers. According to the 2006 MetLife Mature Market Institute study, “Caregiving Cost Study: Productivity Losses to U.S. Businesses,” the estimated cost to employers related to full-time employees with intense caregiving responsibilities topped $17 billion that year. The average employer cost per employee for those with intense caregiving responsibilities was about $2,400.
The costs come from a range of sources, according to the study, including full-day and partial-day absenteeism, workplace interruptions when responding to crises, reduction in work hours and the replacement costs of employees who leave the workplace to become full-time caregivers.
The statistics make a good case for employee benefits that directly address elder care and dependent care accounts, such as Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts that can be administered by the same third-party administrators and payroll companies that administer health flexible spending accounts and long term care insurance on a voluntary payroll deduction basis to employees.
Agents and brokers can also help with information about work/life programs available from health care providers and human resource consultants, seminars that address elder care issues and information about locally available elder care services.
According to a 2008 study by the National Alliance for Caregiving and the Center for Productive Aging at Towson University, more than 70% of employees who accepted responsibility for elder care had to take time off from work to perform those duties.
However, employer-sponsored support such as Geriatric Care Management (GCM) programs helped employees reduce the number of occasions in which they had to reduce or change their work hours in order to provide care. The study also indicated that caregiving employees using support programs were more likely to report their own health as “excellent” while they were participating in support programs.
“As this study shows, workplace elder care programs can have a significant impact on caregivers’ ability to effectively manage their caregiving and job-related responsibility,” says Peter G. Burki, chief executive officer of LifeCare, Inc., in Shelton, Connecticut, a work/life program and specialty health care provider that funded the study. “And GCM users, in particular, who typically receive a more intense level of professional assistance, seem to have the best results so far. With the need for elder care support programs growing exponentially, this is truly a hot-button issue for employers everywhere.”
Employee assistance programs
Employee assistance programs (EAPs) certainly aren’t new; they have been available since the 1970s, as the next step in the evolution of drug and alcohol treatment programs. Most health plans now offer EAPs as add-ons to group health plans, and they aren’t very expensive— just $2 to $3 per employee per month for toll-free telephone access to counselors and three or four brief counseling sessions and referral to behavioral health programs.
However, EAPs work best when they are provided locally by those who are familiar with local behavioral health services, and they can best support productivity when they are part of a human resource strategy, experts say, not just a cheap additional benefit.
Robert Levy, president of Corporate Counseling Associates, an EAP provider in New York addresses the issue in a recent white paper on EAP services (www.corporatecounseling.com/Channels/news/whitepaper.htm).
“More than ever, organizations need to recognize whether their EAP is a trusted business partner or a simple benefit commodity. The best employee assistance programs provide a unique business advantage by combining expertise in human behavior with a deep knowledge of workforce dynamics,” he says.
A good EAP, he says, can do more than take a call from a troubled employee or react to some work force trauma such as a natural disaster or an incident of workplace violence. They can also provide strategies to help employers and their employees cope with downsizing, strikes and discrimination issues such as sexual harassment that can be distracting and time-consuming, he says.
Wellness benefits
Wellness and health education is also not a new service area for many agents and brokers. As producers promote Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs) to their clients, the advantages of wellness support programs, health screening and health education has been getting plenty of attention from health plans and their agents.
However, most agents and brokers tend to discuss wellness as a component of long-term cost control, so they may overlook the way wellness and health education contribute to corporate productivity and employee well-being. Many of the large brokers are already partnering with wellness service providers to create exclusive programs for their clients.
For example, in February, Lockton, Inc., in Kansas City, Missouri, the largest of the privately held insurance brokers, announced an alliance with Revolution Health, a Washington-based consumer health services company. Revolution Health will provide a wellness portal to 2,200 employers that are Lockton employee benefits brokerage clients, a health risk assessment and health screenings service, a personal coaching program and health “concierge” program that includes consumer health education and decision-support tools.
“As consumers demand more control over their health care, our alliance with Revolution Health affords Lockton’s employee benefits clients the unique opportunity to empower and educate their employees, thereby enabling smarter, more cost-efficient utilization of health care,” says Dr. Larry Levy, Lockton medical director. *
The author
Len Strazewski has been covering employee benefits issues for more than 20 years and is employee benefits editor of Human Resource Executive magazine. He has an M.A. in Industrial Relations from Loyola University.