Why It’s More Critical Than Ever to Support Mental Health and How Insurers Can Help
I recently had the privilege of hosting a podcast with Missy Plohr-Memming from The Council for Disability Awareness’ member company MetLife. Missy is a senior vice president of MetLife’s group benefits national accounts sales organization where she oversees sales strategy and growth initiatives. We talked about the 19th Annual Employee Benefit Trends Study 2021 and practical learnings employers—and even employees—could take away from it.
You can listen to the full podcast here.
How was the Employee Benefit Trends survey designed?
• [2:12] 2,651 full-time employees over the age of 21 who were working at companies with at least two employees were surveyed. (This was in addition to 2.500 interviews with benefits decision-makers and influencers at companies with two or more employees.)
• 50/50 split male/female—and 0.3 percent identified as non-binary.
• A little more than half (55 percent) were married, about a quarter (26 percent) were single and not living with a partner, nine percent were single and living with a partner, and the rest were divorced, separated, or widowed.
• Across the race/ethnicity spectrum, Caucasians were the main racial group at 74 percent; the next largest group was African-American at 15 percent followed by Asian at 8 percent. Breakdown of all races by Hispanic ethnicity was 17/83 Hispanic/non-Hispanic.
• As for family status, I found it interesting that 65 percent of survey participants did not live with children under age 18.
(Note: If you’re a data geek, you may want to download the full study and go to the Methodology section on page 41.)
What didn’t change from previous survey years?
[3:47] Two trends remained stable over time:
1. Core benefits such as medical and dental insurance, and retirement plans continue to be important.
2. Non-insurance benefits that address workplace flexibility and work-life balance (this includes various forms of paid time off, including burgeoning paid leave programs).
What’s new?
1. Employees expect their employers to do more in protecting their safety and wellbeing.
[6:12] “The pandemic of the last year changed more than just how and where we work. It changed the relationship between employees and employers around what employees expect from their employer, in particular around safety and wellbeing.”
Safety means not only physical safety, but increasingly psychological and financial safety as well. And this reflects the importance of focusing on holistic wellbeing, which has four dimensions: physical, mental, social, and financial.
2. More than half of all employees worry about their wellbeing—and the concerns are greater for some demographic subsets
[8:20] “Some of the youngest employees in the workforce were hardest hit by the pandemic, particularly from a mental health perspective. I was pretty surprised by that.”
[11:13] Asian-Americans reported they were “least worried” about their wellbeing—notwithstanding the Stop Asian Hate movement.
Why might that be? “I believe one of the reasons we didn’t get as passionate a response from the Asian community as we did from Black or Latinx workforce is the Asian community tends to not air how they’re thinking.
“One of the things I think employers can really do around this particular topic is double down on talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, and giving all members of their workforce a real, viable, listened-to voice.”
3. Workplace flexibility: an accelerating trend that’s here to stay
[16:29] We talk about how workplace flexibility looks different for people whose job structure allows for remote work, and for those who have to work on the front lines.
[17:40] For the first group, what matters is flexibility around where (at home or in the office) they do their work and also when they do it. On this last aspect: “This has really been heightened in the last 12 to 14 months, especially when you think about people who have had kids at home and needed to homeschool them and do oversight of that process.
“We have seen a lot of employers offer what I call split hours where someone might work from 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM and then take from 10 AM to 12 noon to get their kids ready for Zoom classes and oversee that process. And then they head back to work at two o’clock in the afternoon and work until 6 PM.”
[20:06] As for essential and frontline workers: “This is near and dear to my heart, as I have a 27-year-old who is working in healthcare. What they need is different. In the course of the last year, they’ve needed help with enhanced childcare and different home-schooling connections (whether that be connections intra-community and looking to an employer to help them connect to resources for homeschooling, or even benefits to help supplement bringing in tutors).
“We’ve seen employers offer some very creative benefits when they have a big population of frontline workers to help them be present while their family was being cared for.”
What’s also important for essential and frontline workers:
They need to know—and not just the day before—what their next week’s schedule looks like so they can make necessary arrangements for family care and related matters.
4. The continuing role of voluntary benefits for the multi-generational workforce
[22:54] “Employers are dealing with multiple generations in the workforce—four to five generations—depending on your industry. When you’ve got that kind of disparity among generations, you need to offer a pretty wide swath of benefits in your benefits portfolio so people can pick and choose those benefits that mean the most to them.
“And so we have this continuing trend towards voluntary benefits where an employer will offer a core set of benefits like medical, dental and disability insurance, but then allow employees to choose those benefits that are most meaningful to where they are situated in their life. So [employers] can create a benefits package that [employees] value, understand, and can grow with them as their lifestyle changes.
“Which also brings up one interesting tangential trend: Employees told us this year more than ever that they’re looking for their frontline manager to help them understand their benefits. And that places such an interesting burden on employers that I think heightened during the last 12 months.”
5. The increasing complexity of paid leave
[24:42] “I feel like there isn’t a month that goes by that there isn’t talk about federal paid family medical leave, and that there isn’t a state that’s either introducing or enacting legislation for state-level paid leave.
“From an employer perspective—especially an employer who has employees across multiple states or even all of the U.S.—that leads to such complexity. It’s complex for the employer to administer, and it’s complex for employees to understand all of the benefits they have available to them. And that’s where we’re increasingly seeing employers turn to insurance carriers to help them with the administrative burden around these [issues].”
6. Social justice and navigating the stress of current events
[26:09] When it comes to the issue of social justice (or social injustice, for that matter): “Employees want a forum. They want an avenue to be able to talk about how they are feeling around social injustice and really be heard.
“And then they want their employer to take actions from a diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective. And that’s everything from ‘Hey, when I look at my leadership team, I want to see people like me’ as well as ‘I want there to be grassroots efforts and grassroots action to bring us together and value diverse voices more.’
“Those are the two key takeaways, and I do believe employers feel that obligation and take it very seriously.”
The biggest takeaway:
How differently younger and older workers dealt with the pandemic
[28:16] “The older workforce actually misses being in the office. They miss the water cooler talk, the kaffeeklatsches, the happy hours, and keeping connected with the teams. Younger employees love the flexibility.”
There was more, but we ran out of time! So, we’re going to bring Missy back again.
You can listen to the full podcast here.
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