Sitting down with your average consumer and having a conversation about voluntary disability insurance is an uphill battle. From the get-go, you're throwing around a loaded word: “disability.” Whether fair or not, it paints a picture. You can tell them all the stats in the world about the risks, that 1 in 4 of today's 20-year-olds will experience a disability before they retire, but too often they can't apply that statistic to themselves. It's no surprise, since the most commonly cited reasons for enrolling in coverage are emotional ones. Employees are less and less likely to make a decision based on facts and figures.

This, then, begs the question: how do we approach disability insurance? Well, the best way is to remove “disability” from the equation entirely. By doing this, you'll find that there are plenty of ways to have a meaningful conversation with employers and employees about disability insurance that place the focus on financial well-being, a healthy lifestyle and productivity in the workplace.

It's about the paycheck

Not everyone offered a voluntary disability insurance policy will become disabled, but they will all collect a paycheck. More than protecting from a disability, their policy is there to protect that paycheck. Since almost 8 in 10 American workers say they live paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet, that's a message that will really hit home.

Rather than emphasizing the chances of a disability, there's an opportunity to reshape the conversation around protecting the employee's lifestyle. To do that, they need their paycheck. This creates a more relevant conversation; one that's more focused on a pressing need that employees can relate to and that doesn't have to be centered on the fear of a disability.

Kick financial stress to the curb

Forty-six percent of workers spend three hours or more during the work week thinking about or dealing with financial issues. Before a disability even happens, worrying about the loss of a paycheck would certainly weigh on an employee's mind. Voluntary benefits and, particularly, disability insurance can help ease some of that anxiety about finances.

This pays dividends for the employee as well as their employer. For employers, it will help to create more engaged, effective employees. And, the more an employee purchases, the more confident they will be that their income is protected. In this way, disability can be seen as a remedy for financial stress and not just a shield against a disability.

To add to this, some policies include benefits for policyholders that don't have claims. No matter what happens, they will get money out of the policy. Employees compare this feature to many auto-insurance policies, incenting them to purchase and keep their policies. In turn, this contributes to them being worry-free as well as being focused at work and is a great tool to reshape the conversation about the product.

Now, let's say that something unfortunate happens and an employee does have to take time off of work to recover. If, as we pointed out above, many employees need their paycheck to make ends meet and are distracted by financial issues at work, imagine how those issues would be compounded if they just had to take a leave for a month or two without any pay. It's not the disability itself that's the problem, it's imagining life after the disability.

Disability is a part of a healthy recovery

Disability insurance is generally thought of as protection for an employee's income, but it can also play a role in protecting their health. For one, it allows them to focus on their recovery while they're out of work rather than worry about their finances. On top of that, it helps to make sure they don't return to work prematurely.

If an employee doesn't have disability insurance, or doesn't have enough, the financial pressure to get back to work may drive them to return before they're ready. The cost of “presenteeism” is estimated at $150 billion a year for U.S. employers. It's a bad situation for everyone involved; the employee is risking their health and the employer is getting an employee who may not be fully ready to work. Worst of all for everyone involved is that returning to work too soon runs the risk of their condition recurring or worsening. Disability insurance can be the key to making sure that, when they need to, an employee is able to fully recover.

Disability insurance tends to focus on what happens when an employee is disabled. We can't eliminate that from the conversation we have about disability entirely, but we can find other ways to talk about its importance. More often than not, the best way to do this is to focus on the financial side of it and the impact the product has on employees and their employers. There are all kinds of doors that open up when we stop forcing employees to think about a “disability” and get them to start looking at their paycheck and the lifestyle they want to maintain through a disability product.

Pam Handmaker is senior director of product & innovation at Trustmark Voluntary Benefits.

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Taking “disability” out of disability insurance

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