How to thrive in a post-COVID world

We recently explored these issues and summarized our critical considerations for organizations to thrive in the new normal. They’re available in our free downloadable ebook titled The Future of Workforce Health but we’re going to take a shallow dive into some of those topics here. 

Let’s start with some of the things COVID-19 has taught us:

There are gaps in our health and benefits infrastructure

A recent poll League conducted with SHRM revealed that a high percentage of employers are prioritizing the need to build out their offerings to support the physical and mental health of a distributed workforce. This includes offering enhanced virtual care services and having the ability to communicate credible information to employees in real time. In our downloadable ebook  The Future of Workforce Health we discuss the importance of these high-impact additions to an employer’s workforce health strategy. 

In this new normal, we as organizations also need to expand our focus beyond “what we offer” to how we offer it. We’ll need to rethink the delivery experience and the data insights we can glean from it. Necessity will dictate an accelerated move to cloud-based delivery, a streamlined employee experience and rich data analytics that inform future offerings and policies by showing what’s working and what’s not. 

The employee experience matters

A 2019 study we conducted with Harvard Business Review revealed that 63% of employees surveyed don’t know how to leverage their company-provided benefits and 58% aren’t sure what benefits are available to them. Without question, the noise surrounding COVID-19 has only exacerbated the problem. It’s clear that HR leaders must be purposeful in designing a workforce health experience that mirrors the technology we use in our everyday lives. In other words, it must be a consumer-centric experience.

It must have a single point of access so employees can easily find, understand and use the benefits, programs and resources available to them. For employers, this level of integration provides more robust data and is more useful in informing programs and policies.

Savvy organizations looking to drive greater engagement should look to support this streamlined design with personalization. There have been many advancements in technology that allow us to leverage AI and real-time data to deliver timely, targeted care by surfacing relevant resources.

It’s time to re-evaluate healthcare infrastructure

A huge piece of this new, digital infrastructure lies within the power of data insights. HR leaders need to be able to tell a broader story about workforce health—what’s working and what’s not. 

Traditionally, pandemic-readiness and management policies have been tricky for employers to develop and administer as they’re often based on national- and state-level guidance and do not take into account a specific organization’s population health. Savvy employers cannot be caught off guard again and will look to enhance their workforce health data and insights to inform these decisions in the future. In addition to pandemic readiness and management policies, this data can enable targeted health programs to at-risk populations, productivity forecasting, healthcare cost forecasting and mitigation strategies. We took a deep dive into this topic on the SHRM webinar we co-hosted with Cleveland Clinic earlier this month.  

Organizations that prepare for the next crisis are the ones who will survive

COVID-19 has shown us where we need to improve. We need to shift our focus from getting back to the old normal to thriving in the new normal. It’s up to us to learn fast, recover fast, and get crucial healthcare infrastructure in place. We were caught off guard this time around, but there are concrete ways to prepare for whatever the future holds. Explore these and other critical considerations in our free downloadable ebook titled The Future of Workforce Health.