By Michael Lamb, Pacific Prime Insurance.
Born between 1982 and 1995, Gen-Y, also known as Echo Boomers or Generation Next, are entering the global workforce in increasingly significant numbers. For many HR departments around the world, coming to an understanding of effective management of Gen-Y can prove to be a challenge.
It is then important for the modern HR department to know how to approach this group of employees who will have radically different perspectives on a host of issues than those which the company may have previously held.
Additionally, the matter of knowing how to interact with Gen-Y employees is often exacerbated by the fact that individuals born into this age group will, on average, change jobs more than any of their older peers: Gen-Y being almost 80% more likely to change their job than Gen-X.
Insurance is boring
While it may pose a challenge to develop a concrete set of tactics with which to interact with Gen-Y, a good example of how to cater to the roughly 80 million Millennials entering the workforce is through the topic of health insurance. It would elicit no argument from a wide segment of the global population to state that insurance is often a boring subject. Simply looking at the definition of insurance—the equitable transfer of risk from one party to another for a pre-determined fee—is often enough to exemplify the extreme ‘dryness’ of the subject. The very fact that insurance is a dry topic is often anathema to Gen-Y, a generation often stereotyped with shortened attention spans, and an almost constant uptake of media.
I want it now
Many argue that Gen-Y is entirely predisposed to an ‘I want it now’ attitude, and that it is therefore important to display information in a format which is easily relatable to this age group. While PDFs may be the ubiquitous method for presenting professional data through electronic mediums, there is often little incentive for the Gen-Y individual to read through the walls of text contained in any PDF document. Many PDF documents rely on a static index to show the reader where the information relevant to their needs is contained. Scrolling through this index, and sorting out the various topics from one another, will be a chore to the Millennial. While including an index is never a bad idea, simply including a search function on the document (making the PDF searchable) will enable the Gen-Y employee to find the relevant information much faster, allowing them to complete the task and move on.
Additionally, with regards to the generation’s need for immediacy, it is important to understand that these employees will regard the ability to interact with the organisation at all times of the day as being paramount. If the Gen-Y individual has a question, it is likely that they would like the question answered immediately rather than when the business is next open. In the modern world it is often possible to have staff on contact at all hours of the day, and by creating simple online chat capabilities, or even using a tool as simple as Skype, you will have allowed the Gen-Y employee the instant gratification they crave.
Paperless Gen-Y
Gen-Y is fundamentally different from all previous generations. As true ‘digital natives’ they are more internationally mobile, and more liable to have shortened attention spans than any of their colleagues. This will often pose a significant headache for many HR departments, and stresses the fact that any attempt to engage these employees must be flexible in nature.
For example, knowing that Gen-Y is more predisposed than their older peers to change jobs, it can be a challenge, with regards to a corporate health insurance plan, to keep the policy’s enrollments and terminations up-to-date. If employees are entering and leaving a company daily, the working hours put into managing the company’s health insurance census can be extreme. However, if effort was made to move away from traditional paper formats towards simple online databases, then managing the movements of these employees would be as simple as clicking a button.
A migration to paperless policy documents would also conform to the Gen-Y mindset. Waiting for the hardcopy deliverable of a policy, which can in some cases take weeks, is not, in the Gen-Y view, the best use of time. If something has been ordered, in this case an insurance plan, then they would like to receive it immediately. There would be a significant upside in placing corporate health insurance plans on a website containing user accounts where a copy of the policy is uploaded as soon as coverage is confirmed. The documents will be available far sooner than if the employee had to wait for the hardcopy and, as they are stored on a centralised website, the risk of losing important documents is lessened.
Another aspect of going paperless is with regards to making a claim on a health insurance policy. Completing large claims forms and then having to mail or fax these documents back to the insurance company is a highly time consuming task. If there is the possibility to allow employees to communicate solely in electronic format this should be used as soon as possible. Instead of mandating that handwritten forms, an already archaic practice in the Gen-Y mindset, must be physically submitted to the insurer, allow instead for the submission of electronic claims forms. These could be scanned copies of doctor’s receipts, or a central website which the claimant has input their details on, but allows for information to be updated in real time—offering the flexibility, ability to track, and immediacy required by this generational cohort.
Understanding that Gen-Y is more likely to switch jobs and careers, and understanding that the 21st century is seeing higher levels of global mobility than at any other time in history, there becomes a major concern that if the individual falls sick in one place that their medical records may be in another. Creating Electronic Health Records, which are retained personally by the employee in question—either on a portable device such as a USB, or through an online database—will help ensure that the employee has access to all their relevant medical data at all times in addition to lowering costly printing expenses.
Healthcare on the move
When looking at the issue of global mobility within Gen-Y, it is increasingly obvious that this age group is spending far more time overseas than any previous generation. This can cause some serious concerns on the health insurance front as typically the individual must cancel the policy and obtain a new one when they return home after their travels.
New innovations are, however, being made in this regard including the possibility of having “dormancy” imposed on a medical insurance plan. In this instance, the plan would go into a state of hibernation while the employee is overseas, and resume once they have returned to the country and company. While this benefit of dormancy is not yet widely available on the market, it does illustrate that many organisations and industries are starting to recognise the need for flexibility with Gen-Y, and creating products specifically relating to this age group.
In order to make the subject of health insurance interesting to Gen-Y staff, and to increase these employees’ engagement with the company, the optimal strategy would be the creation of an insurance micro-site detailing the company’s specific coverage benefits, claims process and miscellaneous policy details.
While this may be undertaken in tandem with the insurance company providing the policy, a website like this takes all of the best practices with relation to engaging Gen-Y employees and locates the relevant information in a single place. Digital in format, easily searchable, and accessible at any time from any place, a website, or online forum, is always the best way to interact with employees of this age group.
Technically advanced Baby Boomers
While the creation of specialised forums for Gen-Y staff may seem like the allocation of vast amounts of resources to a select group of employees, it is important to recognise that using mixed media strategies effectively can have a positive impact on all the staff within a company. In fact, for a product like health insurance, recent studies have shown that the user group most likely to use digital means when assessing the viability of an insurance plan are those individuals who are soon to enter retirement—the Baby Boomer generation.
As a consequence of this, there is an increasing trend of workers across all age groups relying ever more on the internet and using digital, and online sources to make important decisions. In this regard the creation of initiatives which will enable Gen-Y to understand relevant information more easily will enable all the employees to understand the relevant information more easily, leading to higher levels of employee engagement and a happier workforce.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
