How Your Insurance Company Can Help Develop Your Benefit Plans

By Shelly Duhaime, NFP.

Your insurance company should be your partner in developing an employee benefits package that helps your company and employees.

Healthy employees are happy employees. You want to give your team excellent benefits, but how do you manage when insurance costs – especially for health insurance – continue to rise? Find a company that will partner with you to develop the right health benefits package.

Your insurance partner should get started by looking at your current plans, offerings and company financials. They also need to understand the culture at your company along with your core values. Once the plan is developed and in place, a true insurance partner will provide comprehensive, ongoing data-driven management. Your insurance company should not be just showing up once a year when it is time for renewals. To be a partner, they need to be there throughout the year.

What will they do for you outside of renewal time? They should be monitoring your plan data and utilization of the plan, providing benchmarks and forecasting to help you understand and manage your costs. When renewal time does come, you will be armed with the data you need to project costs and understand how proposed changes will affect your bottom line. 

When it comes time to roll out renewal or new plans to your employees, your insurance partner should be there to help develop the communication program and be on-site or available virtually to host Q&A sessions with your team.

You should also consider offering ancillary benefits to your team to boost your benefits package. These are optional programs that fill gaps left by traditional benefits, allowing employees to pick and choose the coverage that matters to them, giving your company a more competitive benefits plan. These types of programs can go along way for retention and recruiting without affecting your company’s bottom line. Ancillary benefits to consider include critical illness, cancer, accident, life insurance, pet insurance and legal assistance.

Learn more about NFP in their RCS directory.