Empire Life VPs Vanessa Lycos and Christine Wyatt explain how the philosophy around benefits is changing in the workplace
Workplace benefits are at the core of employees’ wellbeing. It’s important that insurers and employers alike keep up with ongoing trends to not only stay ahead of competition but also to ensure that employees’ wellbeing is not being left out.
Vanessa Lycos, vice-president of group product and marketing and Christine Wyatt, vice-president of group distribution at Empire Life, highlighted the future of employee benefits, with a focus on personalization, sustainability, and technology. They emphasized the ongoing consolidation in the distribution industry and the challenges plan sponsors face this year, as well as opportunities and technological trends.
“We're seeing much more consolidation, and businesses are all trying to find a way to differentiate their services,” Wyatt says. “Insurers have to be much more creative in how we serve that market, because they have different segments they’re all in now.”
For Empire Life, Wyatt noted that it’s a challenge but also an opportunity because the Canadian insurer company is small enough in size so they can pivot freely and be more personalized to cater to the various markets. The challenge with this, Wyatt says, is “as these firms get bigger and bigger, some of them eclipse us in size.
“The real key to that is be quite agnostic, as well as flexible and spread the solutions that you're bringing, so that they can take pieces of it along that value chain.”
Lycos and Wyatt also attest that the philosophy around benefits is also changing as they reflect on questions like, “What do people need versus what do people want covered? What's the role of the employer now versus what it used to be? How flexible do you have to be or how much are you willing to pay? How much can you really cost share with your employees? [These questions] will continue to be a big driver,” Wyatt noted.
Lycos is quick to note that employees’ needs and sponsors’ needs are changing and evolving as they want to have a broad array of flexible options so they can customize according to “what their philosophy is”.
“What benefits do they believe are important for their employees and are sustainable? What can they afford? What helps them attract and retain their employee base? We’re making sure that we have a really great product shelf of different options to choose from and making sure they’re consumable and easily understood,” she said.
As for opportunities coming to the benefits space over the next year, Lycos points to a growing appreciation for physical wellness, mental health wellness, and a desire to have products and services available to employees that can meet those needs. She says while long-term disability (LTD) is important, it’s also not typically considered because it’s unpleasant or because people think they won’t “slip in the shower or on a banana peel”, for example.
“If you're really going to protect the financial wellness, as well as the health wellness, not having those products really opens up people to risk,” Lycos said. “If you look at what's your greatest asset, it's your ability to work and if that goes away, then what do you have? While we provide the traditional insurance in case stuff happens, there's also the prevention and access to wellness and mental health.”
“You're better off preventing anything early on versus letting something fester as it becomes a chronic disease and potentially leads to long term disability,” she added.
Wyatt says that while technology, specifically AI, won’t change the work they do, it will help enhance the benefits space to curate the right sources of information.
“We have much better tools now as insurers to make sure that we actually can provide that down to really small employers versus what used to be considered big benefits for big employers. Bringing the right tools and the right access to financial and physical well being is really difficult but I think we're getting better at it because technology enables us to do that,” she said.
In addition to providing insurers the right tools, Wyatt believes AI will provide opportunities to look at trends and data sets “way more efficiently” than ever before. “For years, as an industry, we’ve really relied on historical data. There are certain things we just don't have historical data for. How we’re going to wade into that in the future is going to be a real opportunity to see how everyone changes the game and what risk people are really comfortable with. I think what we'll see coming out of it is probably more specialized risk insurance carriers as well,” she said.
Similarly, Lycos emphasizes the significance of combining digital capabilities with personal human touch will be crucial for the benefits space going forward. “At the end of the day, digital technology and innovation are key for us but never losing sight of the fact that there's a person in charge of the sponsor and there's a person that is accessing benefits. Marrying digital capabilities and innovation with the personal human touch will continue to be really important for us,” she said.
