Stemming the tide
Although the obstacles are daunting, our industry continues to work tirelessly to improve the benefits and health care landscape.
The past few years have tested everyone’s limits, as the combined tolls of the pandemic, political and cultural upheavals, and the transformation of many pillars of our lives have taken a toll on so many of us.
This month’s issue examines the ongoing challenges faced by employees, employers and benefits professionals, including the impacts on Americans’ mental health, the increasing compliance demands facing benefits advisors and their clients, and the numerous ways the pandemic has blurred the boundaries between the personal and the professional and fundamentally changed the social contract that governs the modern workplace.
Related: Employers taking ‘extraordinary measures’ to keep up with workers’ expectations
In “A new focus on compliance?” Scott Wooldridge explores the increasingly complex and demanding pressure the shifting regulatory and compliance landscape places on benefits advisors. As he writes, “Employers will be leaning especially hard on their benefits advisors to help navigate the complex and quickly changing regulatory landscape, but brokers themselves will also need to carve out some time to tackle their own compliance issues.”
And in “Supporting better work/life integration,” Dennis Healy discusses another area that represents both a growing challenge and an enormous opportunity for brokers: helping employers design benefits programs that provide the flexibility their employees need to better manage all the moving parts in their lives.
Although the obstacles are daunting, our industry continues to work tirelessly to stem the tide and improve the benefits and health care landscape in significant and measurable ways.
As Tammera Hollerich discusses in this month’s Face of Change interview, the number of employers and employees who are receptive to innovative ideas and strategies is growing every single day. “We’ve been seeing better buy-in over the past few years… Once we get employees to understand that and incentivize the plans to help them make better decisions, the buy-in becomes easy at that point!”
That spirit of creativity and innovation is exemplified in Josh Butler, our 2022 Broker of the Year. Butler leads by example as he strives to help employers save money while improving the lives of the employees he works with. In our cover story, he notes that a focus on self-funded clients has “rekindled my passion for what we do. I’m a problem solver by nature, and working in that environment allows me to use creativity to solve complex problems. It’s about a whole lot more than just selling insurance.”
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