You’ve spent months designing your new benefits package and the perks you offer your employees. But how do you know if you’re giving them what they want? A recent employee survey conducted by Namely sheds light on what really matters to employees—healthcare benefits.

How Important Are Perks?

According to the survey, 70% of employees would sacrifice the perks you offer to get better healthcare benefits.

PERKS WORTH SACRIFICING FOR BETTER HEALTHCARE

1. Holiday Parties (47%)5. Cell Phone Reimbursement (29%)2. Happy Hours (47%)6. Vacation Days (7%)3. Free Meals and Snacks (45%)7. Bonuses (8%)4. Gym Memberships (40%)8. 401(k) Match (5%)

Healthcare Benefits

If you’re planning to shift more of the costs for healthcare on your employees, you could be hurting your recruitment and retention efforts. While it’s true that most employees greatly underestimate the amount you spend on healthcare, they are increasingly concerned with the amount that comes out of their own pockets.

Studies are revealing that this cost-shifting often causes employees to forego medications, treatments, and preventive services because they just can’t afford them. This could be causing your costs to rise because:

• Diseases aren’t identified until later, when they are more costly to treat.
• Chronic conditions are poorly controlled, resulting in more emergency room visits and hospital admissions.
• Poor health is causing absenteeism to increase and productivity to decrease.
• Poor health is resulting in workplace accidents, impacting your disability or workers’ compensation costs.

Financial Health

Employer 401k contributions are also important to employees, especially older workers. In the past few years, employers have begun focusing more on the financial health of employees. And they are now realizing just what a major impact employee finances are having on their healthcare cost.

• Employees who don’t have enough money to retire stay on your plan longer, when typically, they have more healthcare costs.
• Employees who are concerned with finances could miss more work and be less productive.
• Employees are less focused, making them more prone to accident or injury, which impacts healthcare, workers’ compensation, and disability programs costs.

How Do You Know What Your Benefits Programs are Really Costing?

Controlling your benefit costs is critical to remaining competitive and attracting/retaining talented employees. Most employers rely on annual, high level vendor reports to assess their costs. But these reports don’t reveal key insights, including:

• How healthy your population is
• The issues driving your costs
• Correlations between healthcare, workers’ compensation, and disability programs.

Employers are now realizing they must adopt cost management strategies to control healthcare costs and improve member health. Most approaches focus on changing how healthcare is delivered. One approach, Value-Based Design (VBID), focuses on how well providers deliver care.

A Holistic Approach through Data Integration

While these approaches may prove impactful, they focus only on healthcare. They don’t address other programs and costs drivers impacting your total benefits cost, such as workers’ compensation, disability, or financial wellness.

To get a true picture of your costs, you need to integrate data across all your benefits programs. You will identify the real cost drivers and health issues your population is facing, allowing you to design more targeted programs that improve employee health and well-being and better manage your costs.

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