How To Educate Your Employees on Health Insurance Benefits
Having a comprehensive healthcare program is probably one of the best ways to retain and attract the best employees. Therefore, it is essential to educate your employees about group health insurance benefits. By doing so, your employees will know and understand your commitment to their health.
A recent study by MetLife found that 57% of employees claim that they need more help to understand how their benefits work. Moreover, 58% of employees said that having a wide selection of benefits would make them feel more loyal to their employer.
What is a Group Health Insurance Policy?
As the name suggests, a group health insurance policy offers coverage to a specific group of people. The coverage is provided to all the group members and other dependent family members such as spouses, children, and parents.
Group health insurance policies provide cover to employees at relatively lower premiums, this makes it easier for those who may find it difficult to purchase individual health insurance. Besides, a majority of group insurance policies provide the option of customizing specific requirements of various groups that they are aimed at.
A group health policy is a great way to effectively extend the options for gratuity, superannuation, leave encashment, and other incentives to the employees.
How to Educate Your Employees on Group Health Insurance Benefits
Understanding insurance can be difficult for many people. However, knowing what type of coverage is crucial can be incredibly helpful for most employees. As the founder or the HR manager of your company, it’s essential to convey the benefits you’re offering to your employees.
Given the abundance of technology available nowadays, you have a lot of options with how you can educate your employees. You can ask your insurance broker or the insurance company for any training aids they might have. The aforementioned could incorporate online classes or videos, handouts, or brochures.
Unfortunately, 3 out of every 5 employees don't understand their benefits altogether. Furthermore, this number jumps from 3 to 4 when talking about Millennials. Consequently, the confusion in your workplace will depend on the level of experience and education provided to them.
For this reason, you need to find ways in order to ensure they are retaining the appropriate information and taking the right action to get the coverage they need.
What Methods Can You Use to Educate Employees?
Your understanding of group health insurance will help you think of ideas about how to educate your employees. Here are a few ways you can educate your employees on group health insurance benefits.
- Offer quarterly healthcare classes during lunch hours or bring in your insurance agents to explain benefits.
- Educate employees about different plan options available to them.
- Create monthly healthcare email updates.
- Ask employees what is more important to them, and then provide the information they care about.
- Organize webinars or podcasts.
- Hold an all-staff meeting for training.
Make sure to explain every aspect of your plan. That includes everything, from premium payments to teaching each of the individual benefits that are part of the policy. Besides, ensure your employees know how and where to access their policy benefits.
Explain How Group Health Insurance Helps Them
Once you've chosen the method(s) with which you wish to educate your employees, you will need to keep in mind how group health insurance will help them.
Insurance Cover
Group insurance policies offer auto cover to the employees because they qualify as a part of the company. Further, this insurance is valid till the time they are a part of the company. This also serves as basic insurance cover for those who cannot afford individual insurance cover.
Low Premium
In comparison to other insurance plans, a group insurance policy provides a relatively lower premium. Therefore, it is convenient for the employees to pay the premium and works in their favor. Nevertheless, the premium is based on certain factors such as average age, professional hazards, etc.
Professional Fund Management
In the case of group annuity and gratuity, if the gratuity is higher in a particular year it leads to unpredictable drainage of funds. In such cases, seeking professional fund management proves to be advantageous.
Rider Options
With a nominal supplementary payment, employees can take advantage of other benefits like double accident benefits, loss of future payment, and critical illness. All of these are offered by most insurance companies.
Ease of Payment
Payment of the insurance premium is completely hassle-free. As the premium is automatically deducted from the salary of the employee, there is no delay. Further, this ensures continuity of insurance cover until the employee works in the company.
Employee Welfare
Besides providing protection for the insured, a group insurance policy also works as an employee welfare plan. This is because it caters to a secure future for the insured and their family members. In addition, it also works as an employee retention plan for the company.
Conclusion
By making the policy available through a spectrum of employees, a group insurance policy is the best mode of extending a life cover to members.
The process is hardly different from an individual insurance policy except the premium being low. These schemes are a great mechanism to be used as perks and incentives by the employer to provide retirement and pension plans.
Finally, group insurance policies are an effective way of extending coverage across a wide demographic within a group that has some common ground.
If you want to educate your employees on group health insurance benefits and the terms associated with it, you can download our eBook now and learn about the ABC of Group Health Insurance!
