Employee Health & Benefits in India The Changing Landscape & Emerging Trends 2019-2020

At Marsh, we recognise that health and benefits management is now critical to the growth of the new millennia enterprises that rely on the intellectual capital of their knowledge workers. Over the past two years, the employee benefits landscape in the country has undergone great changes, such as the employee emerging as the focal point of major legislative changes. We routinely consult and advise our clients on several of these changed aspects.

Our latest report Marsh India’s Employee Health & Benefits in India: The Changing Landscape & Emerging Trends 2019-2020, offers a rich perspective on the changing landscape of employee benefits offering in the Indian market.

Drawing on feedback from more than 160 + human resource experts who collaborated with us in this study highlights two core threads across the benefits landscape: Employee focus and Cost Management.

Some of the key highlights:

• 93% of participants stated “Enhancing employee engagement and experience” has been the high-priority initiative taken up, among other key initiatives such as “Cost Management”, “Governance” and “Reducing Insurance Risks”. However, only 56% of them measure the impact of their benefits strategy while the remaining 44% do not have a measuring mechanism in place.
• 64% of participants have had an employee benefits approach that is structured and has been going on for more than three years.
• “Insurance” and “Health & Well-being” ranked 1^st and 2^nd respectively while “Leaves” came 3rd in terms of key focus areas.
• “Improving employee awareness on healthcare” and “Employee engagement” again came in as the key objectives of their health and wellness strategy.
• Globally 37–41% of companies have wellness programs as an active part of their wellness plan management approach either through insurer-sponsored programs or through client advisors who deliver wellness programs. About 16–19% state, they are still experimenting with wellness programs and about 17–21% have stated they have no plans to invest in this area.
• Two out of three participants make use of the wellness services provided by insurers, TPAs, hospitals, broker, etc., offered as free value-added services.
• Digital platforms for medical support, surprisingly, lag with around 17% participants only providing access to their employees.
• Nearly 75% participants feel preferred provider network hospitals help manage the increasing healthcare costs over the likes of “Co-pay on claims”, “Co-share of premium” or “Deductibles”.
• About 43% of participants state that they have some or all of the approaches with respect to Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) present in their programs offered to employees.
• 84% of participants cite “Rising healthcare costs” as being the biggest challenge in engaging and reducing costs.
• Preventive care, D&I, mental well-being and flexible benefits options, in that order, are the trending benefits offered by companies. Flexible benefits has been creating a lot of excitement among organisations with a good number of them exploring the possibility of moving away from the conventional benefits.
• 60% of the participants state a high level of employee engagement within their organisations.

We hope you find The Employee Health & Benefits in India: The Changing Landscape & Emerging Trends 2019-2020 survey report informative and useful.