The health benefits you wish your company had
When Ellen Wichman, Abbott’s manager of public affairs, gave birth to her first baby in September, her labor quickly spiraled out of control. She had an emergency C-section and then two additional surgeries to stop internal bleeding.
While recovering at home four days later with her son, Blake, “the last thing I wanted to do was sift through confusing medical bills from dozens of providers,” Wichman said.
So, she turned to a program offered by her employer that provides third-party care coordinators who took care of the hard work of handling her medical bills.
“We are not in the healthcare system for happy reasons,” said Mary Moreland, Abbott’s divisional VP of compensation and benefits. “And when we come out, [we] have a bunch of bills. You don’t know whom to pay or how much to pay. So, we were looking for a way to support our employees through this labyrinth of the healthcare system.”
Several top employers — companies like Abbott (No. 50 on this year’s Top Companies in the U.S. list) and Johnson & Johnson (No. 45) — are rethinking how to deliver health benefits to their employees and what those benefits look like. This shift is being driven by the increasingly competitive battle for talent and a millennial workforce that demands personalized programs that improve their overall quality of life, not just their work lives.
“Ten years ago, health and wellness was things like health risk assessments, weight loss and smoking cessation,” said Robyn Cameron, senior client partner and global solutions architect at Korn Ferry Hay Group, a management consulting firm. “Now the focus is much more holistic.”
It’s well-documented what benefit plans look like at companies trying to lure top talent. They provide financial incentives to attend yoga classes, meditation training, cafeterias filled with quinoa and vegan cheeses, sometimes six months of maternity leave, funding for fertility treatments, and paid time off to volunteer. The snack offerings at Seattle-based Tableau Software (No. 4) include cold-brew coffee on tap, La Croix, beef jerky and Rice Krispie Treats, to name a few.
But some companies are starting to question what else they can provide their workers. They want to know how can they help employees sleep better, successfully manage their money and care for elderly parents and young children.
Abbott and Accenture (No. 34) offer support programs for parents of children with learning disabilities like autism and ADHD, while BMO Financial Group (No. 15 on the Top Companies list in Canada) has a program specifically for caregivers of family members with dementia. McKinsey & Company (No. 13), Salesforce (No. 4) and J&J pay for nursing employees who travel for work to ship their breast milk.
“All of that concern causes stress,” Cameron said. “It’s about taking worry away from folks.”
Taking wellness out of the workplace
At Johnson & Johnson, good health is essentially a mantra. Its CEO, Alex Gorsky, is a triathlete. Walking meetings happen on the regular. And all 128,000 employees are expected to go through a two-day program that assesses how “physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually” prepared they are within the next two years.
“We say to our employees you will never get more time in life but what you can get more of is energy and energy directed toward things that are purposeful,” said Peter Fasolo, J&J’s EVP and chief human resources officer.
Founded in 1992, the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute hosts the wellness program for all employees at its Lake Nona, Florida, location, and is unique in that it also recently began offering a year-long training program to executives from outside the company. In that program, coaches check out what’s in a CEO’s kitchen cabinets and talk about their sleeping patterns.
In the employee program, J&J workers talk about their personal priorities and learn about foods and activities that can boost their energy levels. Employees who have “graduated” are not only more likely to stay with J&J, they are 25% more likely to be promoted, according to Fasolo. This success underscores the idea that helping employees identify their priorities and find balance in areas that don’t directly have anything to do with their work lives may make them more productive in the long run.
“These are really hard outcomes that demonstrate that when we invest in you, you are investing in our patients and our customers and our consumers,” Fasolo added. “That’s why we do it, because it feeds off itself.”
For a company that each year talks to about 1 million prospective employees and hires about 28,000 workers, creating an inclusive, progressive benefits program keeps the business competitive. And the increasingly senior millennial workforce is one that is interested in working for companies that help them manage their lives and allow an intersection between the personal and the professional, Fasolo said.
“So, yes, we do it because it is the right thing to do and we do it because it allows us to stay very, very competitive,” he added. “This is what our people are telling us. This is what new entrants are telling us, and they are also helping us make these policies be very progressive and tailored to the 21st-century family, which looks different than perhaps when we started this in the late ‘60s and ‘70s.”
Fixing the cost-curve
But even for the most progressive benefits programs, the heart of the issue is still cost.
This is likely why Amazon (No. 1), J.P. Morgan Chase (No. 18) and Berkshire Hathaway as well as Apple (No. 6) are pursuing plans to take more control over their employees’ healthcare, in hope that technology can be used to streamline widespread inefficiencies that contribute to poor patient outcomes and rising healthcare costs.
Abbott had launched its care-coordinator program, which reported 170,000 “interactions” for its 17,000 employees in 2017, as a way to stem employee confusion about what benefits were available to them and how they worked, and not to cut healthcare spending for its employees. In fact, Abbott decided not to work with a different care coordinator provider that wanted to be paid based on how much money it saved for the employees. “I couldn’t say to an employee that these guys are on your side,” Moreland said.
Companies offering similar health advocacy programs rose 12% from 2016 to 2017, according to Korn Ferry’s Cameron, likely driven by the complexity of the U.S. healthcare system. Not only are employers are the hook to pay for healthcare’s inefficiencies, so are their employees, who have to take time away from their work and personal lives to deal with calls to medical billing offices and insurance providers.
In Wichman’s case, the coordinator sent her an Excel spreadsheet of what bills to pay, which ones to skip, and noted when she had reached her deductible and out-of-pocket maximum.
“They made one of the most confusing experiences in life simple,” Wichman said.
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