Four Criteria for Choosing & Implementing a High Impact Employee Benefit

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, attracting and retaining top talent is a central goal for corporate leaders and their human resources divisions.  In this ongoing battle, choosing and implementing high impact employee benefits play an important role.

At the same time, corporate leaders are now confronted with a dizzying array of options for new corporate benefits, which all claim to be the next great thing. Here’s are four criteria to assist human resource leaders in identifying and successfully implementing, a high impact corporate benefit:

clearly identify the goal

Is your company looking to reduce employee stress, increase employee productivity, limit the impact of rising healthcare deductibles, enhance the health and wellbeing of employees, or achieve other worthwhile objectives?  As you assess the value of specific benefits, the goal for deploying scarce corporate resources to buy and implement the benefit becomes your central touchstone. When presented with an array of options, one way of cutting through the clutter is to repeatedly ask yourself, and your benefit consultant, “how does this new benefit promote the goals we have established?

Is the benefit a proven success?  

Many benefit providers don’t ultimately deliver on their promises. What’s the track record of the provider you are assessing? Don’t be shy to press for details. Vendors that consistently deliver results are happy to share their data and success stories.

Will the benefit be widely adopted by employees? 

A corporate benefit only achieves high impact when employees use it. Many benefits are quickly embraced by a large percentage of employees. Others turn out to be the equivalent of a tree falling in the forest, which no one hears: Few employees end up aware of the benefit and even fewer use it. Clearly, human resource professionals want to be certain they are identifying and choosing a service that will quickly achieve widespread adoption among workers.

Will implementation of the new benefit require significant work?

 While a benefit may look great on paper, human resources departments are already stretched thin. If a new benefit requires a substantial work from in-house teams, its chances of success are minimal.

How does First Stop Health’s telemedicine service perform?

In fact, these four criteria were all top of mind as we created our high employee engagement service.

• Alignment with Objectives: For employers and employees our service offers a range of clear, well-identified benefits. For employers, our contractual no-risk guarantee ensures that an employer’s annual healthcare cost savings exceeds the expense of our service. In fact, First Stop Health’s average usage rate of 50%, across our entire base of covered employees, means that we bring employers with 1,000 employees an average ROI of 96%, and bottom line savings of over $100,000 per year.  For employee’s, convenient 24 X 7, 365-day access to high quality doctors, means better health, happier workers, reduced stress, and increased productivity. In short, the benefits of our service are well-established and easy to verify.

• Proven Results: The average usage rate across the telemedicine industry, in the first half of 2016, was just 3%. As a result, there’s no shortage of providers that, sadly, will fail to deliver meaningful results. With an average usage rate above 44% our high engagement service is a proven success. Moreover, we are ready to prove to new clients that we will deliver high impact results. As the only industry provider that contractually guarantees healthcare savings in excess of the expense of our service, we are also the only industry provider that accepts all of the risk associated with the successful implementation of our service.

• Wide-Spread Use: Our industry leading 50% usage rate speaks for itself.  Our sophisticated turnkey employee engagement system is a central aspect of our service.  For each new client, we customize our flexible employee engagement campaigns to best meet the needs of the specific client, and then quickly build awareness and high usage among employees. We do all the work. We bear all the costs. We guarantee results.

• We do all the work: We created First Stop Health as a one-stop shop experience. Our expertise in building employee engagement, mean that we never rely on already busy human resources personnel to successfully implement our program. Once clients approve our messages, we implement the service from soup-to-nuts, and (unlike most telemedicine providers) rapidly build employee awareness and high usage.

One reason we created our contractual cost-savings guarantee was to overcome the appropriate skepticism of prospective clients. We are constantly asked, “In an industry that averaged just 3% usage in the first half of 2016, does First Stop Health really provide over 15 times higher usage?” The answer is an unqualified “yes.”