Employee care | How to help your employees understand their employee protection benefits

Handing over a 50-page policy document, while highlighting the potential for human disaster and despair and, ergo, the need for protection insurance, represents one way of helping your people understand life insurance, income protection and critical illness cover…

But such an approach won’t do you, or your people, any favours these days. Neither will it do the products any favours, to be fair. While their core reason for being hasn’t changed – and is just as valuable as ever – these products and their embedded services also have the potential to bring great value to your people and your business as part of wider wellbeing strategy.

The doomsayer approach dates back to the days of the door-to-door life insurance salespeople. It stayed true to the product and, by all accounts, it seemed to work very well. But, arguably, success was perhaps more due to the personal relationships made than the sales messages shared.

In a workplace sense, protection products have expanded from life insurance to also encompass cover should long-term illness or injury strike; offering either a regular percentage of salary until the individual is well enough to return to work, or a lump sum to help pay off the mortgage or simply enjoy some time out, free from financial worry. These ‘peace of mind’ focused products have always represented a nice to have. But at the cost to the employer of being ‘easy to forget’.