HR leaders say health equity is important, but are they making it a reality?

In short, HR pros are telling us that we must do better to provide equal access for equal care so that all employees stay healthy, happy and engaged. As a result, they’ll show up and do their best work—and save everyone thousands of dollars in wasted healthcare spending because they’re getting the right care, at the right time. 

…but we haven’t quite achieved it (yet)

But when asked whether their employer provides them with all the benefits and resources they personally need to stay healthy, 

• White employees were 7% more likely than their Black counterparts to say yes
• Cisgender employees were 6% more likely than trans, non-binary and genderqueer employees to say yes
• Heterosexual employees were 7% more likely than LGBTQ employees to say yes

So there are still some discrepancies at play here. Historically overrepresented groups are more likely to feel that their employers are taking care of them, while underrepresented groups aren’t so sure. 

And when asked if they believe their organizations offer equal healthcare access to everyone, we continued to see imbalances in employee responses: 

Across the board, we’re seeing some disagreements between HR pros and their employees about whether their organization’s benefits packages are truly equitable.

So why is this happening? If every benefit is available to every employee, why aren’t they receiving or interacting with them in the same way? Where’s the disconnect? 

One culprit might be in the way we’re educating employees around their benefits. 78% of HR pros said their employees understand the health services available to them. And the general employee population agrees: 76% say the healthcare plan and benefits their employer provides are easy to understand. 

But when we look at specific employee groups, the differences continue: 

And some employees are less sure than others that they know where to find the answers to their benefits questions when they have them: 

These differences highlight the need for culturally competent benefits education. If we don’t know which benefits are most important to each employee group, and we don’t know how to speak to each group in a way that will resonate most with them, then our messages will be lost. And if we don’t know where to meet our employees where they are, on the platforms where they’re most likely to look for benefits information, then we’re simply ships passing in the night. 

In other words, we’re not personalizing our benefits communication—and it’s impacting how our employees learn about, understand and interact with their healthcare plans. 

Another culprit? Our lack of understanding about what’s considered “affordable” healthcare to our employees. 

Of course, there are plenty of reasons why each employee group might respond differently when asked about healthcare costs—pay inequality being one of them. But the many explicit and implicit biases that drive disparities in compensation is another topic entirely, and one that we should cover more completely another day. 

For now, here’s the big takeaway for us as HR professionals: once again, it all comes down to personalization. If we don’t have a full understanding of the benefits each employee demographic uses most frequently, or where they’re spending most of their healthcare dollars, then we can’t guide them towards smarter benefits decisions and actions that will help them save more. 

And that lack of knowledge, while unintentional, is a huge contributing factor to the inequities we see in our employees’ experiences with healthcare today.