Forbes, December 05, 2023, By Dinesh Sheth
Novo Nordisk's semaglutide-based medications, Ozempic and Wegovy, have become household names for their diabetes management applications and rapid weight-loss results, as well as public speculations about their long-term health impacts. The use of these pricey drugs spiked so significantly that there are shortages, and it has sparked continued conversation about who should cover the costs for patients who need them and the long-term ROI for those who pay for these and other such drugs in the pipeline.
What do Ozempic and Wegovy have to do with HR? Well, the conversations around these medications actually demonstrate why HR leaders must constantly evaluate their strategies to ensure they best suit organizational needs. This market shakeup is a valuable example of the importance of being mindful of the costs, benefits and long-run impacts of offering them to employees.
As an HR leader, consider these tips that can help you prioritize employee satisfaction while maintaining an efficient, cost-effective HR strategy.
Embrace The Coachability Mindset
The art of leadership is being able to make good decisions with incomplete information. No HR leader has unlimited knowledge of how to handle every situation they may encounter, and that's perfectly normal-especially as employee needs continue to evolve. That's why coachability, the openness to learning and evolving, is an integral mindset for you and your team. It's that willingness to grow and adapt that will help ensure your HR tactics make sense for your organization.
Being a coachable leader means you're open to receiving feedback and applying new techniques and tools (or modifying existing ones) as you go. This mindset is particularly critical as more things in our world become digitized; just think of all the manual, paper-based processes that no longer meet the needs of today's employees. You must consider how to integrate new approaches that get employees engaged, such as adding digital communications or hosting virtual benefit fairs to help ensure employees are in the loop when it comes to their benefits.
Simplify Your HR Strategy
Like coachability, one of the biggest considerations in a leadership journey is simplicity. As an HR leader, you'll have a lot on your plate that can interfere with your ability and bandwidth to transform strategies. To have the greatest impact, you must be able to identify what's most important to the organization, what's most important to the employees and what's most important to stakeholders—including investors, clients and partners—and prioritize by importance. This busyness can feel overwhelming, especially during open enrollment or hiring seasons. Simplifying your day-to-day routine, as well as properly planning for important campaigns, can make a huge difference in the way you serve the employees at your organization.
Resource optimization is key when HR staff is overworked and there are more things to do than hours in a day. Having a solid foundation for your HR strategy makes your life easier when things are busy. This could look like leaning on employee engagement apps, communications tools or benefits administration platforms to alleviate the administrative burden that comes with completing all your HR duties. Providing a single source for all employee resources and communications can also be an impactful way to simplify the employee and employer experience.
Outside of digital solutions, another useful strategy is leveraging personalized benefits messaging to avoid overloading communication channels. With every benefit you offer, determine who it impacts the most, then communicate its value to those individuals directly. For example, if only a handful of employees are interested in adoption or fertility benefits, limit messaging to that group. Then you can save organization-wide communications for benefits that appeal to everyone, such as preventive care participation.
Look For Repeatable Results
Consistency is a key component of any strong HR strategy. Part of your role is developing an efficient process that guarantees consistently strong results in every aspect of your department's function, such as hiring and onboarding, compensation administration, benefits enrollment, performance management and more. This will help enable you to devote more time toward supporting your organization's long-term strategic goals.
For instance, consider using a digital HR system that allows teams to eliminate manual tasks through automation. This enables HR leaders to focus on the larger priorities that make a difference in their employees' lives. Integrating digital tools and expanding HR touchpoints throughout an entire organization enables complete workforce engagement and employee success. By enhancing and expanding digital platforms, HR teams can focus on real-time and strategic priorities, with the assurance that employee satisfaction and success are inevitable.
You can also introduce wellness challenges or wellness assessments, programs and challenges to track year-over-year growth in preventative care participation. This can help engage employees in company culture. Supporting employees' commitment to health can lead to positive company impacts like lower turnover rates, fewer sick days among participants and so on.
HR Must Evolve With The Times
The example of Ozempic and Wegovy's popularity is a reminder that new products or services are always entering the market, and that has an impact on the kind of benefits your employees need. Even if your HR strategy is solid now, the ability to evolve and adapt it is crucial. So whether you're aiming to address work-life balance, health concerns or general support needs, you'll be more successful with an approach rooted in coachability, simplicity and repeatability.