Just in time for the April issue, Benefits Canada conducted a virtual roundtable with leaders from top Canadian group benefits providers and consulting firms who were keen to respond to questions about benefits plan costs: How do plan sponsors wring value out of their benefits programs without incurring costs? How can employers encourage members to increase their knowledge about their benefits?
This year’s Group Benefits Providers Report leaves it up to the reader to decide whether each panellist’s take on the industry is moot or apropos. What’s notable, though, is what one can extrapolate about what it actually takes to contain costs in a comprehensive employer-sponsored benefits plan. (Hint: think prevention, education and active living.)
Some experts had a common dedication to the search for cost drivers and seemed more than willing to adjust their approach to benefits design if it goes easy on the bottom line. And who could fault them for that?
But what about the indirect value derived from investing in employees?
There’s a commonly quoted Public Health Agency of Canada statistic that says 16 million adult Canadians spend half of their waking hours at work. That number alone accentuates the notion that the stakeholders most affected by direct and indirect costs are the employees themselves.
If that figure doesn’t grab you, here’s another fact: employee engagement, health behaviour and physical health are “simultaneously significantly associated with job performance and absenteeism.” Need proof ? Researchers published their findings of employee self-rated performance and absenteeism according to employee engagement, health behaviours and physical health based on an analysis of 20,114 employees from three geographically dispersed companies in the United States in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. They concluded that efforts to improve employee productivity should take a holistic approach, encompassing employee health improvement and engagement strategies.
Those engagement strategies, in my view— and possibly shared by many benefits providers—point to the hard and soft costs, as well as the risks and returns, of the benefits plan.
Moot point or apropos? You be the judge.