The difficulty of attracting and retaining employees will play out in an employer’s favour with better adoption of employee assistance programs (EAPs), believes Eric Trudel. The executive vice-president and leader of group insurance at Beneva shared this opinion in an interview with the Insurance Portal.
Joining Trudel was Brigitte Marcoux, the director of practice excellence, health and wellness expertise at Beneva, who says she’s noticed low utilization of EAPs in small and medium-sized businesses.
The shortage will help
"The labour shortage will help," says Eric Trudel about promoting employee assistance programs. He says his client policyholders understand the importance of keeping workers healthy, "because as a company, you can't recruit as easily as before." He says insurers too are facing the same reality (see the Insurance Journal, June 2023 issue, pages 16 to 18).
Trudel recalls the days when an employer could easily replace an absent employee. That is no longer the case, he says. The labour shortage, in his view, is an incentive to align communication about these programs. "I also think that insurers, intermediaries and policyholder employers work better together than they did 30 years ago. Before, we worked much more in silos. We now work as partners," he says.
Citing a case of close collaboration between Beneva, a brokerage firm, and the employer, Trudel points out that it once was the broker who helped companies communicate the details of the assistance program to the employees. "Sometimes it is the employer who will communicate on their intranet and the insurer will participate in the message. What is important is that all stakeholders are more sensitized and work better together. That's what will help," Trudel says.
Incredible excitement
For her part, Marcoux says her team experienced an almost 200 per cent increase in employer requests for support in organizational health, compared to before the pandemic. "The labour shortage has created incredible excitement in organizational health," she observes.
"Future workers entering the job market have expectations and needs from their employers. They expect a culture focused on health and well-being, a culture that takes care of their mental as well as physical health. Employers have no choice but to meet these expectations," she further explains. She adds that this is a positive legacy of the pandemic and labour shortage.
This article is a Magazine Supplement for the June issue of the Insurance Journal.
