Thanks to the pandemic, employers have now made the connection between employee well-being, both in and outside the office, and strong business. “A healthier well-being leads to more productivity, which ultimately affects the bottom line,” said Tim Massey, CEO at Penmac Staffing Services, a temp agency that helps job seekers and businesses with employment needs and HR services. The challenge for many companies is keeping their staff engaged with their health benefits.

“We’ve had to develop a stronger level of empathy with the employee base that we didn’t have prior to two years ago,” Massey said. “It allows us to resonate with employees that Penmac isn’t just a place to go to work, but has a level of care about your work-life balance, and also your well-being.”

I moderated a conversation with Massey and Kim Tabac, chief people officer at League, a digital health care platform platform designed to enable and accelerate care transformation.

That webinar, titled “Benefits Engagement: A Tangible Indicator of a Happier & Healthier Workforce,” and hosted by From Day One, addressed the connection between employee wellness and the bottom line, and how employers can encourage employees to take full advantage of the benefits available to them.

Health Benefits Are Top of Mind Now

In the past, employees didn’t care much about health coverage until they or one of their family members got sick, said Tabac, but the Covid-19 pandemic spurred new interest in healthcare benefits. “With Covid, we’ve actually seen employees accessing their benefits more so than ever before, asking a lot more questions and becoming a lot more educated as consumers of benefits and their wellness and health care coverages.”

And employees are more confident about using those benefits, too, Massey said. “I think the level of comfort over the last two years of our employees to actually engage and ask about their health benefits, as well as their mental wellbeing, has increased a lot.” So, if there’s more interest in health, is there room for employers to increase use of benefits? Getting employees to use their benefits before they get sick is a big opportunity, according to Tabac and Massey. 

Both encouraged companies to promote preventative healthcare. “[Provide] better benefits that are really about prevention, really about wellness, helping employees to really engage and think about their health every day in order to stay healthy, instead of thinking about benefits as insurance coverage for when you get sick,” Tabac said.

Additionally, awareness should always be a priority, a strategy that has worked for Penmac. By making staff aware of the benefits of telehealth, they cut down on expensive urgent care visits. “A lot of our employees didn't even know that telehealth was an option for them. So when they got ill or sick, they would run to urgent care. And in a lot of those instances, telehealth was a better option for them. So just engaging with them and helping them understand the proper way that they could utilize their benefits has been very important.”

Giving Workers Ample and Diverse Opportunities  

Massey said Penmac also created more opportunities for employees to participate in their own wellness. “In the beginning, when we started kicking off [our wellness program], we had about 50% participation,” Massey said. “But that was mainly because the majority of it was weighted toward fitness—in steps and activity. What we found is that, really, the people who were already exercising were the 50% that were participating in the wellness program.”

In response, Penmac redesigned the program to include things like wellness checks, community and volunteer involvement, and financial education, and more employees jumped on board. “We have to make sure that we’re providing lots of education and lots of outlets for our employees to get the type of wellness that works for them.”

Penmac also remade incentive programs. For years, their smoking cessation program rewarded participants with lower premiums, but Massey found the money wasn’t a big enough incentive to get smokers to quit. They tried something new: To incentivize employees to get a health risk assessment, they offered a paid day off, and it worked. “Our approach has become targeted, maybe more of a customized-per-employee type to personalize the situation, even hyper-personalize it,” Massey said.

League did similar customizing of wellness benefits and perks when the company went remote. For example, since 30% of employees no longer report to an office, League converted its in-office wellness programs into dollars and reimbursement programs remote employees can use.

League also instituted quarterly wellness days. “We saw a huge uptake,” Tabac said. “Seventy percent of all employees last year took some of their wellness days. That’s huge for us.” The reason employees were so eager to take those wellness days was because they required no prior planning, like vacation days do. “It wasn’t about taking a whole week off or ten days, it was really about waking up in the morning and saying, ‘Today’s not the day, I’m not going to be able to be my best,’ and allowing employees to activate on their own personal needs to be their best selves when they came into the office.”

The Employer Responsibility for Employee Wellness

What the pandemic showed us about the relationship between work life and personal life, Tabac said, we can’t unsee. “I believe that we are now responsible to ensure that the level of care that we have provided during this trying time continues, because we can never go back and pretend that Suzy shows up to the office every day and forgets that she has three kids hanging off of her or a puppy that was sick.”

It’s a responsibility that ultimately benefits the company’s health. “It’s very difficult to be 100% productive when you don’t have the support you need, and it is incumbent upon employers to be providing appropriate benefits and appropriate perks to allow their employees to be fully productive and fully present,” Tabac said. “It pays off in spades. It pays off in the amount of days that people take off of work. It pays off in the amount of time that they’re at work and they’re able to be fully productive.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Va. She writes about the workplace, DEI, hiring, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others.