Locked in an all-out competition to recruit and retain the best talent, HR leaders are coming up with all sorts of creative perks and benefits. From kegerators to electric-car chargers to pet insurance, companies seem willing to do just about anything to give talented workers — especially those mysterious millennials — another reason to come aboard.

But with all the focus on peripheral benefits, a lot of organizations are forgetting what's quite likely the most important perk they offer: health insurance. It's the one benefit that almost every business offers and every employee uses. For most businesses it's also among their largest costs. But few businesses say anything specific about their health benefits to their prospective employees — or for that matter, to their actual employees.

HR leaders who omit these details are missing out on a critical opportunity. By regularly communicating new or unique elements of their health plans to recruits and employees alike companies can deliver constant reminders of the most valuable benefit they provide.

There are certainly good reasons why they don't tout their health benefits more. The human-capital team may feel like their plan isn't that unique, even if it's a good plan with an excellent provider network. Or maybe they think about it more like a necessary evil than a perk. Indeed, trust in health plans is at an all-time low, so why would you want to promote them to your team?

Demanding and promoting, a better experience

But I'd argue that's where benefits specialists and HR leaders should start — with demanding a better customer experience from their health plans, and by considering the customer experience when they choose a plan. While they still lag most other industries, some health insurers are beginning to make strides toward more customer-friendly services like online account management, streamlined call centers and more personalized communications.

The next step is to identify the most valuable or unique benefits provided by your health plan. Many plans today offer telemedicine services, enabling their members to interact with providers virtually. But employees can't take advantage of that if they aren't aware of it. I'd bet most of your team would like to know that the next time they have a sinus infection they can get a prescription for antibiotics that morning after a quick video conference rather than sitting in their doctor's waiting room for an hour or doing nothing for days and letting it get worse.

On a deeper level, benefits and HR professionals need to be aware of their overall member populations and what options exist for managing the group's high-risk employees. The good news is that payers are beginning to use population management tools to collect data — like retention rates, satisfaction scores, risk assessments and patient outcomes — that can help in-house professionals, in collaboration with their insurers, deliver custom communications, marketing campaigns and provider solutions to specific member populations.

So if a lot of the folks on your team are likely to develop carpal tunnel syndrome, or a large portion of them live in an area where the propensity for diabetes is abnormally high, your health plan may offer services for those at-risk groups. You should work with them to help employees take proactive steps to prevent or mitigate the risks. That's mainly a communication challenge.

The right information to the right people at the right time

Getting the right information to the right people at the right time can help build a more trusting relationship between payers and their customers — and help employees see the benefit they're getting from their employment. It also drives proven outcomes: for instance, a recent Change Healthcare survey showed that some health plans reported an 80 to 90 percent follow-up rate when they used a more targeted approach to outreach on flu shots. By leveraging analytics to provide effective, targeted communication, employers were able to get more of their at-risk members vaccinated, keeping employees from losing work time due to the flu and avoiding the incremental costs that would come with flu-related hospital visits.

Perhaps those communications should come from the payer, or perhaps they should come from inside the company. Ultimately, though, benefits specialists should also encourage health plans to engage with their members on plan features and benefits directly, early and often, rather than just once a year during open enrollment.

Payers should want to be active participants in these endeavors. With the steep rise in self-funded plans — many focusing on delivering better customer experiences — traditional health insurers must strive to do the population health management, analytics-based communication and relationship-building that those competing plans offer.

And with the labor market today tighter than at any other time in the last half-century, employers need every advantage they can get — you want your benefits not only to be used correctly but to be known. Free snacks and office ping pong are great, but they shouldn't be the only perks your prospective hires are talking about. They should also be hyped about telemedicine, a new wearable, dynamic wellness programs and quality care that can save them — and your organization — money.

If we start treating health benefits as a benefit, maybe the talent out there will start to see it that way too.

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Mark Nathan is the founder and CEO of Zipari, Inc. He began his 25+ year career as a robotics engineer at NASA and spent half of his career leading the modernization of customer experience at Guardian, one of the largest insurance companies in the nation.

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Why you should start treating health benefits like an actual benefit

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