Many companies are revamping their well-being strategies to ensure they are more equitable and inclusive. FlexGenius examines how advancements in digital health and well-being are enabling employers to achieve these goals effectively.
Adopting a “one-size-fits-all” approach to employee health and wellbeing can overlook the unique needs of individual staff members.
For example, while a cycle-to-work scheme can encourage physical activity, it may exclude colleagues who are unable to cycle, turning it into a tick-box exercise rather than a valuable workplace benefit.
HR professionals are increasingly utilising cutting-edge technologies to enhance and personalise employee health and benefits plans. By monitoring and analysing employee data, they can tailor plans to individual needs, thereby improving effectiveness, fairness, and cost efficiency across the organisation.
A good benefits package encourages a healthy, engaged and productive workforce. It fosters loyalty, reduces presenteeism and absenteeism and helps combat stress, anxiety and burnout.
However, it’s often easy to overlook the individual when trying to help the collective. It’s time to accept that everyone’s experience is different. A fixed offering is no longer enough in 2024.
Case in point: According to the CIPD 2023 Health and Wellbeing at Work Report, employers must do more to support employees through serious life-changing circumstances. Of those surveyed, only 46% offered support for menopause transition. Meanwhile, 47% were offering help with chronic health conditions or disabilities, and 37% provided support with pregnancy loss.
This is where digital health and wellbeing innovations can help. Combining technology like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics tools can help employers close those gaps, individualise benefits, and increase inclusion.
Smartwatches and fitness trackers help wearers identify potential health issues and take preventative measures before treatment is required. However, their benefits don’t end there. Several studies suggest that wearables also empower individuals by motivating behavioural changes and encouraging self-monitoring.
By putting the power into your employees’ hands (or, more accurately, on their wrists), they can gather insights about their health, such as heart rate or sleep patterns, giving them a jumping-off point to engage with personalised wellbeing tips or seek advice.
Once individuals start advocating for their health, you can seek feedback on the gaps within your wellbeing strategy, ultimately helping you shape a fairer, more inclusive benefits plan moving forward.
In addition to employee feedback, you have a treasure trove of information in employee benefits data to leverage.
For example, by monitoring usage stats for minority groups, you can gain a greater insight into the effectiveness of the healthcare apps and employee assistance programmes (EAP) you currently employ.
You can benchmark your internal data against external DEI metrics to identify where improvements need to be made and ensure equity and equality in all aspects of your plan.
As organisations grow, so does the volume of data to analyse and comprehend. HR professionals need a helping hand. Enter artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
AI and ML can transform employee engagement and benefits admin by handling time-intensive and repetitive tasks like survey creation and data analysis. You can access real-time stats about employee health, wellbeing, attendance and performance and pinpoint the differing needs among your workforce.
Putting insights and learnings into practice will help your benefits plan to be more inclusive to a range of life stages, personal circumstances and ailments while reducing its risk of being underused or undervalued.
The key to utilising new digital health and wellbeing innovations is providing employees with relevant and flexible benefits that offer true value and support inclusion.
FlexGenius is an employee benefits platform that lets users combine the best and most innovative health and wellbeing benefits in one place. The customisable software means you can create and tailor new benefits packages to your organisation’s evolving demographics, with the flexibility to change as your level of employee insights grows.
By leveraging emerging technologies, HR professionals can reduce time-consuming tasks, improve data analysis, identify key trends, gaps and opportunities and build a progressive and inclusive health and wellbeing strategy.
If you’d like to join companies experiencing increased employee engagement and retention by offering thousands of benefits, sign up to FlexGenius today.
To find out more about FlexGenius or book a demo of our leading flexible employee benefits software solution, why not book a demo now or visit our contact page or give our team a call on 0800 652 4745
This article was first published on the REBA website. FlexGenius is a member of REBA, the Reward and Employee Benefits Association.