Hidden Generosity: The Benefits Issue Across Healthcare Organizations

It’s no secret that healthcare workers were hit the hardest of everyone during the pandemic. Long hours, high-stress environments, and intense safety protocols were just the tip of the Covid iceberg for anyone working in hospitals, healthcare, or health systems. Because of this, many employees are quickly becoming burnt out, resulting in high-turnover at many healthcare organizations.

To combat this, hospitals and healthcare organizations across the country are introducing new, unique, and in many cases, extremely generous benefits packages to better attract and retain talent at their healthcare facilities.

Unique and generous benefits

Healthcare organizations nationwide are offering benefits like:

• Domestic networks that offer free care (think, free mammograms, etc)
• Tuition reimbursement
• Childcare reimbursement
• And others

Problem is, a lot of healthcare organizations have brought in these new benefits, but they're still experiencing retention issues. Why? HR teams are starting to realize that while they offer these generous benefits, many employees don’t even know about them. You can offer the best benefits package out there, but it won't be beneficial if your employees don't know their options.

Why are employees missing out?

So, the question becomes, why don’t employees know that these options exist? Unfortunately, educating healthcare workers around benefits can feel like an impossible task.

Employees work around the clock, meaning calling everyone in for a benefits ‘lunch and learn’ is essentially impossible. Also, hospitals and healthcare facilities offer a wide range of roles. Employees range from surgeons, to nurses, to X-ray technicians, administrative staff, custodial workers, cafeteria staff, and more. These workers can range from ages 18 to mid 60s, and can come from a range of family backgrounds, education levels, and more. This makes educating each unique employee about the benefits that are right for them, incredibly difficult.

Benefits education can’t be a “one size fits all” approach.

Hidden generosity

Another reason why employees are missing out on these benefits? They’re buried beneath pages of information. We’ve seen many healthcare organizations who have 20+ page benefits packets, and these extremely generous, unique benefits aren’t even mentioned until deep within the packet.

Let’s be honest, employees probably aren’t going to read all 20+ pages, so if you offer something amazing like tuition reimbursement, but you don’t mention it until deep within page 16, no one’s going to know it exists.

So…what do we do?

The first step to getting your employees to use their benefits is proper education. We know that educating healthcare employees about their benefits is a tricky, nuanced task – that’s where we come in. Nayya’s benefits decision support tool helps each employee uncover the benefits that are best for their unique situation, and educates them on all of their options along the way.

An employee has children? Nayya might recommend the childcare reimbursement plan your company offers that they might not have even known about prior. Or, someone has a preexisting condition that requires them to get frequent, pricey scans? They might not realize that leveraging your domestic network of care would offset the cost of these scans or remove the cost entirely.

What it truly comes down to is the ability to educate your employees on all the incredible things that your organization offers. Retaining the best healthcare talent means taking care of those employees, and you’ve already taken a step in the right direction by bringing in these generous programs. Now, you can take the final step and make sure these programs are being properly communicated to your employees so they can take full advantage of your generosity.

Learn more about Nayya and how benefits decision support can help your healthcare organization better educate your employees, save on costs, retain and attract the best talent, and more—get demo.