Benefits platforms are an investment, both financially and in your people. But they also need to drive value and make a positive impact on your workforce. Not only do employers want the best health and benefits experience for their employees; they also want meaningful and actionable insights around what’s happening within their workforce — securely stored but easily accessible.
For some, assessing value can be challenging, but technology is helping to overcome the barriers we once saw around monitoring benefits uptake and understanding employee motivation. In this article, we discuss how technology can help increase the ROI of your benefits strategy and create deeper value.
Creating a Better Employee Experience
A good technology platform increases value for its users. At a simplified level, if employees have a better experience accessing their employee benefits, they will be more engaged with the options available. This can lead to improved wellbeing — which can improve company profit, customer service and employee retention.
Technological innovation has driven consumer expectations, and this has filtered across into the benefits space. Technology platforms are now consumer-grade; they align to the digital expectations set by disruptive technology companies. Good benefits technology provides anytime, anywhere access to employees looking to manage their benefits or understand their options.
Integrating benefits platforms with your existing framework can be challenging, especially for businesses who are expanding geographically or growing through a merger or acquisition. Adopting a highly customizable technology platform can help streamline these processes, even across a global infrastructure. For example, Aon’s benefits platform uses automated processes to reduce the administrative effort required to input, transfer and set-up benefits programs across an organization. This can have a huge impact on the ROI of implementing a new technology platform; not only does the initial setup require less resource, but the ongoing benefits management also reduces the effort involved.
Data to Inform Employee Needs
While it can be easier to understand what benefits employees want, it is more challenging to determine what they actually need. Employee health data is one way of getting an unbiased picture of overlooked gaps and opportunities to provide support. Alternatively, companies can access more granular health information via health tracking applications and drill down into specific risks. Designed to report on key personal health metrics at an aggregated level — and anonymized to protect individual privacy — these applications can inform better decisions around physical and mental wellbeing. Technology-informed early intervention can help reduce long-term costs associated with chronic illness or problem debt.