Giving employees the tools to take charge of their own wellbeing is key to delivering value in workplace health benefits, according to Axa Health.
The insurer said it recognised employers cannot afford every wellbeing solution on the market so they must be a lot smarter in targeting solutions to meet the needs of their workforce.
Speaking at the Reward and Employee Benefits Association’s Employee Wellbeing Congress, Axa Health head of wellbeing Dr Chris Tomkin said the starting point to affordability was giving employees information and the responsibility to take charge of their own wellbeing, such as giving their health age.
“The reason we use health age is that talking directly to people about the number of health risks they have and their percentage chance of heart attack is someone demoralising,” Tomkin (pictured) said.
“Whereas if I can say ‘look, you may be 45 but your health age is 52’, at an intuitive level that engages people with inaction and more importantly, we can say, okay if you take these actions you can be four or five years younger.
“So trying to translate the technical language of risk into something more accessible such as health age works fantastically well.
“It’s one thing to say people have responsibility, quite another to say they have responsibility but give them what they need to get the job done, be it skills, be it knowledge, be it insight into their own biometrics and where their status is today,” he added.
And Tomkin added when employers can derive value from wellbeing services, it is employees and their organisations that reap the benefits.
“We’ve got to make sure these things really deliver because at the heart of it, if we can deliver to our people, we get the benefits people are really after – not so much the financial ones but the culture ones, the growth, the purpose,” he continued.
“For me, that’s what energises the business and makes things happen.”