BearingOn.Health Original Contribution

March 2024

by Mark Head, MDH Consulting 

Conversations about improving the “employee experience” with benefits, and the “patient experience” with healthcare are, well, everywhere. To improve these experiences, we start from the awareness that “we are humans first,” and “employee” and “patient” are roles played by the same person.

In both benefits and healthcare, we want more people to respond to our calls to action. In benefits, we’re asking the employee to enroll and use the programs. In healthcare, we’re asking the patient to follow a preventive or a treatment regimen.

Keeping all of that in mind, here are four ways we can improve the benefits enrollment process by recognizing it as a form of sales. We can up our game by better understanding how people make buying decisions. While the concept, as applied to benefits, doesn’t translate directly to healthcare, many of its elements can still enhance the patient experience, too.

The first invitation – incentives

In the late 2000s, as wellness programs became more common, so too did the use of incentives. Employers clearly wanted more of their employees to use these plans, so many started offering $25 gift cards for completing a Health Risk Assessment or a Biometric Screening. That worked, up to a point. 

Some very forward-thinking people suggested, “Well, we need to increase the incentive amount – that’ll do it!” Yeah, somewhat. The problem is that not everyone is motivated by money. Some are more motivated by learning, some by teaming up with their buddies, and some by knowing they might be supporting a favorite charity. 

But how do we know who’s motivated by what? We’ll talk more about that below.

The key thing to remember here is that — to use retail parlance — offering an incentive can get more people to at least “walk in the door.” But there’s still more we can do.

The 2nd Invitation – appointments and encounters, with a purpose

Benefit counselors have been used for Open Enrollment for many years. As a classic high-touch approach, it gives employees the chance to have an expert answer their questions, address their concerns, understand their barriers, and offer guidance for both core and voluntary benefits. Done well, employees report high satisfaction. 

Online self-service models have also evolved to offer more personalized experiences through decision support tools. By using well-crafted questions about employees’ needs and goals, they provide logical, structured guidance. 

But what about all the benefit programs that aren’t tied to open enrollment? How can we support employees and continue to drive more enrollment throughout the year? Many of these programs, like well-being and benefit navigation, are high priorities for employers, yet they’re consistently under-utilized.

The 3rd Invitation – going beyond logic, to emotion and desire

We’ve gotten some “extra” enrollment by using incentives. And then, using follow-on, personalized enrollment sessions (in-person or digital), we’ve increased enrollment into our targeted programs.

But ongoing invitations to enroll and participate in key programs are more likely to work when the outreach is framed around employees’ emotional needs and values-based aspirations. It’s an opportunity to go beyond logic and build actual desire by linking the program benefits with how an employee’s life will be improved. This can be done more easily than you might think.

The 4th Invitation – making the sale

There’s a sense in which all of the steps described here — as part of a “sales process” — can actually happen “all at once.” To the extent we can cause that to happen during open enrollment, we’ll certainly get better enrollment results. But for all the other “under-enrolled” programs, we’ll be more likely to succeed if we shift from, “Well, they didn’t enroll” to “Well, they haven’t enrolled – yet.” With that attitude, we’re more likely to succeed by designing our ongoing outreach and communications to follow more of a sales approach.

At the core, we want to help employees feel “safe” with their decisions, feel “heard” about their emotional needs, and be empowered to attain some of their desires. We can do that by leveraging the logical brain to justify the decision that the safety and the emotional brains have already made.

Going one step further: values-based personalization

Using “The 4 Invitations” framework is, by itself, a leap forward in “human enrollment and human engagement technology.” But there’s even more that can be done.

If at each step along the way we layer in psychographic (values-based) segmentation strategies, we can create an ever-more-personalized experience that continues to increase the likelihood of getting more employees to enroll and participate in our programs. We can do this using psychographics. We can infuse the language we’re using across all the steps – with employees' worldviews, values, beliefs, priorities, and preferences. This benefits all the stakeholders: employees, employers, consultants, and vendors.

The last word

Getting someone to enroll in a program is so similar to getting someone to buy something, it’s surprising that this approach hasn’t been more common. After all, benefits and healthcare are multi-trillion-dollar industries!

By mirroring a process that’s been proven, time and again, across the complexities of selling all types of high-ticket products and services, we might just have found an important new key to increasing benefits enrollment and engagement. 

Importantly, just being aware of this approach in the benefits realm can help inform how to improve the patient experience and increase patient engagement in the healthcare realm, too. 

So, why are conversations about how to do this, well, everywhere? Because everyone knows we have been banging against the proverbial “upper-limit problem” for, well, forever.

Humans are hard-wired to avoid pain and to pursue pleasure. Let’s do a better job of selling how our plans will help our people do both.

About Mark Head & MDH Consulting

With 4 decades of combined experience in employee benefits consulting, wellness, and health management, Mark Head brings a unique combination of dynamic perspectives into a clear vision of where the future of health care is moving — and it's moving towards deeper human connection, awareness, and engagement.