Enabling all their people to access healthcare benefits - The Bupa Success Story

Julie Stephens, Global Director of Wellbeing at Bupa 

What is your focus when it comes to supporting wellbeing through employee benefits? 

“I think the focus has really been on looking at all of our people across Bupa. Prior to starting this piece of work, we were supporting the top 40%. It was typically hierarchical. And now all of our people at Bupa can access benefits, as well as broader wellbeing support. We talk about wellbeing across five key aspects – physical, psychological, social, financial, and environmental. And that includes all sorts of things from learning support, through to actual physical benefits, through to manager training.”  

How has Benefex technology helped? 

“We found the benefits app has been really fantastic for us in terms of accessing the whole hub and having all of our benefits in one place. Prior to that, they were spread between different places, and it also wasn’t as easy to find everything. The take-up has been amazing – within just a few hours we’d got the number of logons that we were hoping to get in the first two-weeks. So huge awareness, but also people are using it to update their benefits.”  

“One of the things that employees are looking at is life insurance and who their beneficiaries are. We’ve had more people take that up than we’ve ever had before, which has been fantastic. The impact has been huge across all of our businesses in Bupa, but for the UK, in the care home businesses specifically, our engagement score went up from 66 to 82, which was just fantastic – over this period we’ve been introducing more and more benefits to our people.”  

And that’s had a particular impact for frontline teams? 

“For our frontline teams, we also found that they were talking about the benefits and everything that they were hearing about from us. And there was a trending hashtag that was #loveworkinghere, which is still the biggest trending hashtag across Bupa today.”  

What’s it like working with Benefex? 

“Benefex has been really great to partner with in terms of what can be a really technical process. But also, I really appreciate all of the thought leadership we get from people like Gethin, sharing the latest and best practices for us to learn from, and then we can share that feedback with employees.” 

Katie Duxbury, Head of Pay & Reward Services at Bupa 

Your recent benefits strategy has been very tightly linked to the Bupa purpose, is that right? 

“Our purpose is helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives and making a better world. Ironically, only 40% of our highest paid workers had access to our private medical insurance. So, what we set about to do in 2022 as a global ambition was to give everybody at Bupa access to the healthcare products that we make available to our clients. And that puts them in a better position to then service our customers.” 

 How did you go about realising your benefits goals? 

“We took a fair amount of time to just listen to what people wanted and what became quite evident really quickly was that just extending private medical insurance to those families wasn’t necessarily going to be the right thing. The needs were a little bit more nuanced, particularly needing access to primary care, whether it was GPs, physios, help with physio, mental health support lines, that kind of thing. So that’s what we created – that area of being able to access primary care and also to be able to access that on behalf of families and partners in the household, as opposed to just for that individual. Being able to extend that was really important to us.” 

“This really met our deskless workers where they were. I think what’s really interesting at the moment is we’re now talking to other clients that have desk-based people with PMI and are now looking at our new Viva Healthcare product, for their deskless workers as well. We’re starting a little revolution, I think.” 

 How has Benefex technology helped? 

“It’s really early in our journey right now, but what we’re finding is take up on every aspect of our benefits package has been kind of supercharged by having the technology in people’s hands.” 

“We’ve seen nearly 1,000 GP physio appointments made. We’re seeing a 400% increase in accessing our cash plans. We’re seeing people just mooching around the system and having a look at what benefits they’ve got, which gives them the reassurance they need, as opposed to necessarily needing to buy or transact something – and that has a massive impact. It just gives people that safety net knowing that, for example, they’re covered with life insurance if something should happen.”