5 Things that won't stay in Vegas

I recently had the privilege of attending the Human Resource Executive Health and Benefits Leadership Conference in Las Vegas.  The event was well run, the speakers were (for the most part) terrific, and the session topics relevant.

Here are five things I learned:

1.        A representative from Intuit, the massive software company, spoke about its wellness program.  The speaker walked us through the seven years the company has been working on the wellness program and the various initiatives and incentives it has introduced.  In the end she admitted that she could NOT produce an ROI on the medical costs despite the constant tweaking and incentives.  She said Intuit will continue with a wellness program because it fits the company culture and employees appreciate it.

2.       Jim Klein from the American Benefits council once again predicted (I heard him give the same prediction two years ago) that COBRA will either end or change.  Essentially he argued that with the option of the public exchanges, there is no need for COBRA, as former employees now have access to coverage (probably with subsidies).  I hope he’s right.

3.       A popular rating agency isn’t just reviewing cars and washing machines, as they have now expanded into the health care ratings industry.  The newly created division, called Healthy Living, now reviews and ranks doctors, hospitals, health insurance plans, medications, and even medical procedures.  They’ve also partnered with the National Business Coalition on Health to create an employer toolkit called Choosing Wisely, which contains a wealth of resources employers can use to help communicate their health plan.

4.       Three of the major players in the health care cost transparency market came together for a panel discussion.  While it turned into a bit of game where each vendor wanted to show how much better its product was than its competitors, what was clear to me was that this is a product that is going to be offered in more and more health plans.  We’ve been ratcheting up deductibles and telling employees to be better consumers of health care.  Now we finally have a tool that they can use to help them make those decisions.

5.       Something that I’ve been working on in my Benefits department was hammered home when Adobe and Benz communication spoke together about using good design to communicate benefits.  The slide that got people taking pictures of the screen simply said: Good design helps people make good decisions’.  And it’s so true.  I’ve recently collaborated with our advertising team to help make our emails look nicer.  The feedback was great and the response to the emails has been huge.

The Dreaded Email from HR

Let’s face it: Employees dread getting emails from the HR department.  Many employees have told me that they simply ignore emails from HR or have them set up to go straight to the SPAM folder.  That’s because the emails are usually dry and boring and are about new rules, clarification of existing rules, or in general bad news. I don’t blame employees for not wanting to read them.  The problem is that every once in a while you really do have something important to say and you’ve lost your audience.

I decided that I needed to do something fun, different and unexpected in an attempt to get employees to change their views and hopefully get them to start paying attention.  An idea came to me when I was reading the list that the Social Security Administration publishes containing the most popular baby names for that year.  Many news outlets pick up the story and report about the biggest movers and speculate why certain names become more or less popular than they have previously been.

I decided to do the same thing with the names of babies born to employees at my company.  I ran a report of all the names of babies born to employees that year and ranked them by popularity.  Then I compared them to the national data.  This didn’t take long at all and I put together a cute email blast to the company with the results.

The feedback was overall positive.  Many employees loved the idea and thanked me for doing something fun and unconventional.  A handful of emails were negative (“is this what you do all day?”) but overall I accomplished my goal.  The trick is coming up with interesting topics to send out every once in a while to keep the momentum and to ensure that employees are opening the important emails as well.