What does "employee engagement" even mean?

As you read this, an under-pressure CFO somewhere is walking into the office of their HR benefits leader asking tough questions about employee engagement with the company’s health care benefits:

• Have the expanded offerings paid off for our employees in terms of better outcomes? 

• Have they paid off for our company through employee retention and recruiting, higher productivity and happier employees? 

• Are enough employees consistently engaging with our benefits in a meaningful way?

CFOs have always had to ask tough questions and grapple with a host of macro- and microeconomic variables affecting profitability and growth. In the past few years, however, health care has rocketed toward the top of this list and is now the second-highest cost on a company’s profit and loss statement after compensation. In fact, 70% of employers express rising concern about their ability to continue to afford healthcare coverage for their employees according to one recent study. 

For cost-pressured CFOs, benefits managers, and their advisors, knowing whether employees are engaged and utilizing their health benefits is both mission-critical and distressingly elusive. According to Quantum Health’s just-released engagement study, 67% of employers see increasing employee engagement with benefits as essential to reducing long-term health care costs, while 73% believe it is key to improving health care outcomes and employee satisfaction. Despite this level of importance, only 20% of benefits leaders surveyed believe their employees are currently optimally engaged with their health benefits.

How can we begin to close this engagement gap?

What does “engagement” even mean?

Before we as an industry can even begin to move the needle on engagement, we must agree on a shared definition of “engagement” that accurately reflects the real-world behaviors and outcomes we seek to influence. Only then can we determine how best to pursue it, to link it back to organizational goals and employee health, and to know if we’ve succeeded.

With the rapid rise of digital health tools and point solutions, industry definitions of engagement are at best vague and inconsistent – and at worst, fully miss the mark. For too many digital health partners, evaluating engagement has become a matter of counting clicks – whether website visits, logins, or broad-based emails or texts opened. But not all digital interactions are equally significant and meaningful in guiding members on their health journey — and not all meaningful interactions occur through digital means. Likewise, most definitions of engagement are too narrow and exclusive, leaving providers and other ecosystem stakeholders out of the equation entirely – a huge miss given that providers play the most active and important roles in a patient’s health care journey.

So, how should employers and their partners think about, and measure engagement?

It’s time to update and upgrade engagement

First, for engagement to be a valuable concept and measure of the outcomes we seek to achieve, we need to link it to the real behaviors we care about. For example, when evaluating the value of “digital interactions,” we go deeper in our guiding principles to determine if the same action with a member could also be done by our care coordinators. Was the interaction meaningful? Did it offer an opportunity to directly impact the member’s health care journey? Under our definition, simply navigating a portal, changing profile settings, or viewing their benefits isn’t true member engagement.

Second, the definition of engagement must be expanded to reflect the full benefits ecosystem surrounding members. Having the right navigation platform serves as the nexus for every meaningful interaction, proactively helping inform and connect members with the right solution at the right time. 

Building off of our guiding pillars, we’ve redefined engagement as quite simply any meaningful interaction with a member, their provider, or a partner that creates opportunities to impact the member’s health care journey. Whether we do this with our in-house clinical teams, our care-coordinating Healthcare Warriors, or GenAI-enhanced digital engagement, the emphasis is on driving greater personalization and more efficiency in getting members the right care at the right time.

A single point of access

This form of deeply personalized, meaningful engagement is by no means easy to achieve or manage. Overwhelmed benefits leaders can hardly be expected to handle this on top of everything else on their plate. Our recent engagement study found that over half of HR leaders reported little to no time to evaluate the success of current benefits (58%) or set ROI targets for benefits (56%).

Independent health care navigation is the key to driving engagement at scale and taking on the burden of measuring and managing outcomes. Only the right navigation partner providing members with a single point of access to the entire health benefits ecosystem, is positioned to influence and capture every meaningful member interaction and bring deeper engagement and better outcomes. 

With health care costs projected to surge nearly 8% in 2025, getting this right is more important than ever. Employee engagement is too critical, and the stakes are too high, to skate by with vague definitions and meaningless benchmarks. Now is the time to raise the bar and set a new standard for meaningful engagement.

Chris Reed is the Director of Value Creation / Member Engagement at Quantum Health, responsible for advancing the organization in creating greater dimensions of value for self-insured employers.