Right Side Up

If employees were healthier both employers and employees would benefit.

Employees have a direct and obvious interest in improving their own health. For employers, the biggest potential benefits come in the form of reduced labor costs and improved workforce performance. This issue should be a win/win.

So far however, US employers have approached this challenge from a command-and-control, carrot-and-stick standpoint. They have offered employees financial or other incentives in exchange for their health improvement, risk reduction and chronic disease self-management efforts.  For example, employees in the US can  “earn” extra days off, reductions in their health insurance premiums, cash payments, gift certificates, and similar rewards for participating in health management efforts that make specific health behavior changes (e.g. quitting their tobacco use) or achieving specific health metric changes (lower weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.).

A recently popular form of insurance in the US is “Consumer-Directed Health Plans” (CDHP). However, most CDHP programs also ‘incentivize’ employees by increasing the financial risks of ill health: by increasing the deductibles they must pay before the insurance plan take over.  These deductibles are in the $1-2,000 range for individuals, and $2-5,000 for family coverage.

But now there is another, more buyer-centric, approach that could work much better. This is the concept of Employee-Directed Health Management (EDHM).

EDHM looks at the employer/employee contract from a different angle: the angle of the individual. It lets individuals make their own decisions about their health plans, choosing the key elements of the strategy and initiatives they will participate in including how their health will be assessed, improved, and what they will gain thereby. It also broadens the scope of the relationship beyond ‘payment for work done’ to how the employer can help individuals enhance their ‘life assets’ – and how, in turn, individuals’ improved life assets can help the employer reduce costs and improve performance.

The five key life assets involved in employee-directed health management are:

·        Health – mental, social, and spiritual, as well as physical – including energy levels, “morale” and related work-affecting dimensions

·        Power – reality and perceptions regarding one’s degree of control over work and life demands, plus a degree of autonomy or protection against unwanted control by others

·        Talent – reality and perceptions of personal capabilities, self-efficacy, value in the labor market, self-esteem, etc.

·        Time – amount of discretionary time available and the degree to which it can be managed. (Because working to improve one’s health requires an investment of time, this is usually a ‘cost’ rather than a benefit of such initiatives.)

·        Wealth – income and assets. Employees may receive financial incentives to buy healthier food, exercise equipment or fitness center membership, or to make life style changes that positively their health (e.g. quitting smoking, reducing alcohol or eliminating illegal drug use). They also benefit financially from reduced sickness-related costs. (For example, obesity reduces lifetime earnings)

What’s in it for the employer? Current estimates suggest that improved employee health will improve US employers’ financial performance by two to five times as much as healthcare cost reductions alone.

UK and other European employers do not have as much to gain from EDHM as their US counterparts (because they do not pay health insurance) but they still stand to benefit from the broader effects of improved workforce health: higher productivity and performance and reduced staff turnover.

To find out more, see the full White Paper.

Scott MacStravic

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AlanMitchell Miscellaneous

It’s hard to imagine a mantra more powerful in modern commercial circles ‘identify and meet customer needs’. It’s also hard to imagine one more mesmerising in its delusions. To ‘get’ buyer-centricity we need to rise above its amazing mind-bending qualities.

First, let’s appreciate the power and subtlety of this mantra.

• It has infinite potential and therefore appears complete; it means we have to search no further for answers. Human needs and wants have no bounds, so at first glance the mantra leaves us nothing else to consider. This effect is subtle but hugely important: it shuts down curiosity. We no longer have to worry about what we are doing, only how well we are doing it.

• It’s both a call to action (what to do) and a guide to action (how to do it). To meet customer needs we first have to identify these needs, which means we need to focus on customers, understand them and gain insight into them. This is a clear agenda for work and progress.

• It is a moral justification. What better a win-win is there than prospering by meeting customer needs? Everybody benefits; everybody is striving to serve the customer better. Success is a reward for doing the right thing.

Put these three qualities together – completeness (and therefore closedness), practicality and moral purpose – and you have a recipe for ideological triumph.

Now let’s consider the assumptions the mantra smuggles in along the way. All of them are perfect expressions of an industrial age mindset.

• A corporate perspective. As soon as you utter the mantra ‘identify and meet customer needs’ you leave the world of the individual and cross the fence to the other side. You are no longer looking at the world through the eyes of an individual. You are looking at ‘customers’ and potential customers through the eyes of a corporation. You have externalised yourself, becoming an outsider ‘focusing’ on an object of interest (You simply cannot ‘focus’ on yourself from the inside. Try it). That’s why, behind its ritual exhortations to ‘get close’ to customers, mantra is in fact, both the expression and a cause of deep estrangement. Marketers’ quest for ‘closeness’ to their customers is just a symptom of the huge and irrevocable distance that has been created.

• A control perspective. The mantra ‘identify and meet customer needs’ unwittingly sucks you into a deep and almost invisible assumption. It is the corporation doing all the identifying and meeting: the corporation is doing everything; the customer is doing nothing. The corporation is active; the customer passive. The corporation is the subject; the customer the object. The almost inevitable baggage of the identify and meet customer needs mantra then, is that the individual is powerless and passive … ‘needy’.

• The supply perspective. As soon as you utter the mantra ‘identify and meet customer needs’ you assume a massive and insurmountable division of labour between customers and companies. Needs are met by producers who produce. Value resides only in the processes of supply. All ‘the consumer’ has to do is consume.

• Corporate narcissism and the assumption of ‘customer capture’. By definition, a customer is someone who buys things from us. The word ‘customer’ assumes a pre-existing, one-to-one relationship between the company and its customer. The customer agenda is only about the value provided by that particular company – not the value ‘needed’ by the customer overall. At the same time, it defines customer value in terms of what that one particular company produce.

This last assumption generates a huge blind spot in the world of marketing. The real, underlying reason for the mantra is not because marketers want to meet peoples’ needs, but because they want to make money selling stuff. The real purpose of the mantra is to ensure the customer buys this particular marketer’s particular product or service.

That’s why, in reality, most day-to-day activities of most marketers do not revolve around ‘identifying and meeting needs’. They revolve around something entirely different: trying to influence customers and potential customers to choose their particular offerings. Here, marketing quickly flips over from ‘identifying and meeting customer needs’ to ‘changing customer attitudes and behaviours’ … (for the company’s benefit). Not about meeting customer needs therefore, but meeting the needs of the corporation.

This leaves one set of customer needs completely sidelined and ignored: the need to ‘make the right choice for me and my circumstances’. No marketer is interested in meeting this need. It might lead the individuals to choose an alternative supplier.

To see just how limiting and limited the mantra really is, consider an alternative. ‘A buyer-centric business or service helps individuals make and implement decisions better.’

Making better decisions is the fountainhead of all value, because it necessarily leads us to the right product or service. It also takes us way beyond all those industrial age assumptions. It looks out at the world from the point of view of the individual. It’s about better use of information, as distinct to the supply of products or services. It’s about the individual being active and in control, not the corporation. It’s about the individual’s purposes being placed centre stage.

Also, in the process of making better decisions, we as individuals cannot help but identify and articulate needs – thereby overcoming the estrangement generated by the marketing mantra.

“Helping individuals make and implement decisions better” isn’t a perfect description of what Right Side Up businesses and service do, but it’s a start. Can you help me improve on it?

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell Marketing