Benefit Trends: Is HR Ready for Change?

Today's current benefit environment is a rapidly changing environment, surprise-surprise! Changes brought about by National Health Care Reform, state and local ordinances, collective bargaining issues and a plethora of incidental issues have created challenges for the HR community unlike any we have seen in the past 10 to 20 years. Are you ready? This is the question at hand!

To be an effective manager of your company's health and welfare programs today, you must ask yourself these key questions:

• Are you promoting or hindering consumerism?
• Are you emphasizing employee productivity and overall health as key goals?  Do you have metrics to support this?
• Are your decisions focused on the business objectives or the employees' desires?
• Do you hold your employees accountable to change their unhealthy lifestyles? If so, how? Can you prove it?
• Are you engaging in long term health and welfare strategy planning and can you clearly illustrate this to your C Suite?
• Are you demanding transparency from your health and welfare vendors?
• Are you really focusing on the true cost drivers/metrics/education and accountability factors, or are you just rambling along renewal after renewal?

If you truthfully answered no to a majority of these questions, then stop reading the rest of this article and find the nearest box of Kleenex as you will need them while you view the list of job postings. Obviously I am half-heartedly jesting here to prod you to action, but in all seriousness, that could be the result if you are not careful.

Human Resource professionals today have a unique opportunity, unlike any before. History has shown that a time of great adversity also brings tremendous opportunity.  But to shine in these challenging times, we must raise our game level. For far too long, the C Suite has never given Human Resources its due course. Now, in all fairness, half of this is justified.  To a degree, we allowed that to exist. We have not done a good job at influencing their decisions with the tools we have at our disposal. 

To change this perception, HR professionals must change their roles from tactical to strategic. We must prove that we are accountable and have the organization's bottom line in hand. We must dazzle them with brilliance and illustrate (through metrics and clearly crafted long term strategies) that we truly deserve a seat at the table. Be proactive versus reactive, empower consumerism (yes, that means making the employees more engaged whether they like it or not), create a culture of health and wellness, and illustrate this action plan in a way that makes the C Suite pay attention. 

Properly allocate resources, capacity and track results of this long term strategy. Engage the chief financial officer and the CEO in discussions on exactly how you plan on achieving this result and what resources will you need to achieve this goal. Have a clear game plan and be able to illustrate it in written communications what type of support you will need from the C Suite.  If they are not on board, then the plan is flawed from the beginning. Their roles must be defined clearly. 

The end result of this strategy must be the ROI to the organization.  Have clearly defined metrics through biometrics, data analytics, health risk assessments, EAP utilizations and other tools widely available. Set quarterly meetings with the C Suite to review and prove the effectiveness. Consider creating a Board and Benefits committee to engage the entire team. Produce and promote communications to the entire organization to continue the buzz.  In my opinion, if we can accomplish these objectives, we clearly can become the teams' MVP.  Oh, and by the way, once this has been accomplished, don't be afraid to seek the promotion you truly deserve.

Paul E. Clark is president, CEO and principal of Clark & Lavey Benefits Solutions and serves on the board of directors for Manchester Area Human Resources Association.