Health & Protection benefits

If you’re looking to recruit the best and the brightest (as most of us are….), how can your company differentiate itself?

A few years back, it was easy: offer a fantastic pension package, and you immediately stood out from the competition.

Nowadays…? All employers have to offer a qualifying workplace pension scheme by law.

And as the minimum contribution rose again in April 2019, even a generous pension package doesn’t stand out as much as it used to. (Though of course that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be offering one!)

So if pensions no longer always work as a key differentiator…what does?

Whilst most companies provide employees with a base range of benefits, the key is to make sure the right people are being offered the right benefits to add value at each stage of their life journey - and that they know about them.

And with benefits budgets being squeezed by tougher trading conditions, value for money becomes crucial.

How do you know if you're getting the benefit of your benefits spend?

The average number of days per year an employee is absent is 5.9. Having Health & Wellbeing benefits in place could assist with managing employee absence. (Source: CIPD Absence Management Survey, 2019).

Supporting HR teams

Each year, your HR team could be spending hundreds of man-hours overseeing the renewal process for your different risk benefits, and transferring data from your systems to the provider’s.

In the event that an employee needs to call on one of their protection benefits, accuracy of data is absolutely key. However, submitting data is time-consuming, complex and can be liable to human error.

Our three-stage management process supports you throughout your scheme renewal.

Working with you, we will help your renewal process go smoothly by:

Supporting you as you submit your data to your selected provider.
Helping you sense-check employee records so that the process is simple and efficient.
Benchmarking your premiums to ensure that the rates charged by your provider(s) are competitive vs. the market as a whole.

Benefits to employees

From an individual point of view, most people recognise that some element of protection is important whether it's for their car, holiday or home.

Interestingly, though, personal protection, the one that matters the most, is often the one that’s given the least consideration, mainly because it’s the one no one wants to think about.

We think it helps if you think of it as protection against a problem any person may have when they embark on a journey.

It’s something that can at least make things a lot easier if something really does go wrong.

If an employee suffers illness or injury they’ll have more than enough to think about, and it will be even harder for their loved ones should the worst happen.

But with protection, at least they can ensure that bills can be paid and loved ones are still supported.

So it makes sense for employers to use protection as a differentiating benefit, one that can help put employees' minds at rest.

Private Medical Insurance

82% of employees offer PMI to their employees

Health and wellbeing

83% of respondents state that their organisation provides benefits to boost employee health and wellbeing

Critical illness

32% of employees offer critical illness insurance for partners and dependants, should the worst happen

Dental insurance

Dental insurance is offered by 55% of employers to help employees keep the dental costs down

Health and risk benefits

Protection for your employees

A group life assurance scheme enables employers to provide a tax-free lump sum to employees' loved ones and can even be used to provide a dependant's pension to an employee’s family and/or children, should they die in service.

The right cost for your business:

We specialise in getting the best terms from the competitive provider market. Although risk benefits can often be cheaper when bought in volume, even for smaller organisations we're able to provide a fully managed service at an affordable cost. Our service aims to achieve the highest levels of cover with limited underwriting.

How do you keep your business running smoothly whilst an employee is on long term sick leave?

We help employers establish the right insurance arrangements to enable a level of salary to be paid to an employee during a prolonged period of sickness or absence through injury.

We can help you manage the cost of continuing to pay some or all of your employee's salary whilst they are absent from work.

We access the whole market to find the right type of policy, providing cover that's aligned to your benefit strategy at a cost that's affordable to the business. Income protection gives you leeway to use the available budget to bring in temporary resource to meet client or productivity requirements.

Using income protection insurance allows you to be the kind of caring employer who values your employees, whatever happens to them during their time with you.

Critical illness can cause serious financial hardship to employees.

Why not investigate providing a Group Critical Illness policy?

This will pay a tax-free lump sum directly to your employee should they suffer any of a list of defined medical conditions or surgical procedures (classified as 'critical illness events') and survive for 14 days, or 6 months in the event of Permanent Total Disability.

A benefit for an employer who really cares

We can design a policy that is affordable for you and your employees. Our skills in negotiating with the market to obtain the right level of cover, claim management and cost will help you take the financial stress away from your employees during a crucially stressful time.

PMI is widely recognised as one of the 'must-have' benefits for attracting and retaining your workers.

Finding the right medical cover can be time consuming and confusing. We can source a range of flexible Private Medical Insurance options for employers.

Consider the cost to your business if one of your key staff fell seriously ill. Could your business afford to wait whilst they are waiting for NHS treatment?

Health Cash Plans can be a valued low cost benefit employers can offer their employees to assist with everyday healthcare needs.

Does an employee need physio for those sporting injuries, or because something isn't moving as well as it used to?

A Health Cash Plan can provide an alternative for a company that wants to help its employees but isn't able to afford the cost of full medical insurance, or it can be used as another option alongside the provision of PMI.

Don't forget: Dental Insurance

Dental health can be just as important as general health and with dental costs increasing, providing a company paid dental plan is a valuable employee benefit

Pension communications: how to keep decision-making rational in the face of a pandemic