Karen Wilson, Director of Benefits and Wellness, Higher Education

On this episode of The 3rd Question we talk with Karen Wilson, Director of Benefits and Wellness for a University about how COVID-19 effected the pace of change in public sector higher ed and her passion for wellness.

Video Transcript

Ryan James:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to The 3rd Question. This is a video interview thought series with public sector thought leaders from around the country in both municipal, higher ed and K-12 organizations. And today I'm excited to be joined by Karen Wilson. Karen is an expert in all things benefits and wellness and HR, currently in a higher education group, but also has been all over the place.

Ryan James:

So before we get started, Karen, thank you for joining me. I'd love for you just to tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your role, and then we'll get into our questions.

Karen Wilson:

My name is Karen Wilson. I am the Director of Benefits and Wellness, and I have been involved in the benefits realm, gosh, I hate to say it, plus 25 years. And to your point, I have worked in both the private and now in the public sector. And I would say that I'm not quite all things benefits, but I'm very close, very close.

Ryan James:

Hey, well, that's what I love to hear. Well, with that, let's get into our questions. So my first question for you is I would love for you to talk a little bit about some of the challenges, but maybe also as importantly, the opportunities that you see when it comes to administering benefits for a large higher education organization. And I'd ask that maybe what you've taken from some of your private sector experience into the public sector, where you see some of those opportunities?

Karen Wilson:

Sure. Let's start with the challenges. I think first and foremost, many organizations like the one I'm in have kind of this legacy expectation. They have had really, I'll say, lived in an environment where benefits are extremely rich and that was a part of the philosophy of the organization to attract and maintain faculty and staff. Many times when you think about marketplace types of total comp, many times in the private space you have higher salaries, but you also have higher benefit costs. Well, in the public space, you often see a richer benefit and maybe not quite as extravagant of a salary comp.

Karen Wilson:

This is a space of change. It always has been and will continue to be. I do believe that higher ed has been protected from that change, or should I say the pace of change, until most recently. So there are just some economic forces. Some were already occurring, but the pandemic certainly sped up that those things.

Karen Wilson:

And so challenges really are about effectuating change in plan design or premiums and how that works operationally within the organization and how you communicate across departments in academia. And so those have been challenges.

Karen Wilson:

So let's talk about the opportunities. So the opportunities really are the fact that we are becoming much more accustomed to platforms like the one we're on today. And so we're really leveraging that as much as possible in order to reach people in places that normally we couldn't reach them.

Karen Wilson:

We actually have a campus that's outside of the country. And so I find myself on these types of calls many times to really help explain benefits. And benefits is like a different language. We use acronyms. People don't really understand why you have an HSA and you have to meet the deductible versus a PPO, but we're using these tools to really help communicate more complicated issues to our constituents and I think that they have a better sense of what was driving the change to begin with.

Ryan James:

Yeah. It's funny you said the different language, I mean literally the different language if it's outside the country, but our research has shown that over 80% of people are confused about benefits in general. It doesn't matter the generation. I know everyone thinks, "Oh, well, people who have been doing benefits for a long time or have been taking benefits, or the young folk that are just coming in who are asking mom and dad, 'Well, what do you do?'"

Karen Wilson:

Exactly. I call it right brain and left brain thinking all at the same time. Because there is a financial component to it, but sometimes there's just things like good spend. You want people to use the benefits, and that seems counterintuitive, but we want you to use it in a way that provides you with a higher quality outcome and that you and your family feel well.

Ryan James:

When I look at the world of benefits, I see three major pieces typically, not always, but typically around how organizations are strategically using them and providing them for their workforce. I see the carrier community, I see a lot of brokers who are advising and partnering, and then I see technology. And I'm going to say technology a little tongue-in-cheek when it comes to the public sector because they're getting there. They tend to be a bit of a laggard when it's utilization around technology for their workforce. Still a lot of people out there are doing things on either super legacy ERPs or on paper, a lot of papers still floating around.

Ryan James:

So I'll say those are the three main pieces, but with your expertise from this world, how would you identify some of the strategic ways to leverage some of those pieces, those partnerships when it comes to plan design and communicating with your employees and ultimately controlling costs?

Karen Wilson:

Well, I wish that I had a straightforward answer for you.

Karen Wilson:

Those, I call them like legs of a stool, right? And so how do we utilize it so that the stool supports the weight and utilization? And so we do use a consultant, but not in the same way that a consultant or broker is often used in the private sector. And so although there are things that I can utilize them for, they don't have direct access to the plan as you would a broker.

Karen Wilson:

That being said, I still leverage their insights, their expertise to help continue to bring new insights, benchmark data so that we can make sure that we are at least aligning what should the future look like, even if it's going to take us a few years to get there, right?

Karen Wilson:

And then you are correct from a technology standpoint. That term to me can be broader than just utilizing some sort of outsourced enrollment or some sort of data warehouse. There are various elements of technology, and to your point, we do use an ERP system that houses what I call the enrollment selections, but doesn't and can't analyze or manipulate any information. And so getting that information out of our current ERP system can be challenging, as well as there's no way to even add information back into our ERP system.

Karen Wilson:

We are using a tool that is similar to Tableau for data visualization so that we can begin to start to talk about not just claims utilization and where's the spend happening, but also what's the cost to deliver this? And so that we can begin to show those intersections and determine what's our ROI, what are the things that we want to focus on? But I think ultimately what we're trying to do is think strategically about outcomes.

Ryan James:

We're now in a world where everyone wants a much more personalized experience, whether that's buying something on Amazon, to your benefits, right? It's not a one size fits all anymore and where a personalized approach specifically around benefits is what's driving the best outcomes. Because you're talking to someone at an individual level using technology, using history, using data, like you said, to help them be more educated to be picking the right types of benefits for them in that point in time in their life or their career.

Ryan James:

So I applaud you, it doesn't happen overnight, but in looking and thinking in that direction for your organization. That's awesome.

Karen Wilson:

Thank you.

Ryan James:

Well, speaking of the future, I'm a prop guy. Everyone who watches this knows I am. And for this second season of The 3rd Question, I've been giving everyone a blank check. It's a big blank check. So if I was going to hand you a blank check, Karen, that you could use towards your organization to grow, evolve, change in some way, I assume you have a lot of goals and objectives for your piece of the world there. What would you do with that money and why?

Karen Wilson:

Okay. Well first, let me put the disclaimer out there that if you handed money to a public institution, it has to go through certain processes-

Ryan James:

Of course.

Ryan James:

I'll also say, also, disclaimer, I'm never going to be writing you a blank check.

Karen Wilson:

I love it.

Ryan James:

So we're on the same page.

Karen Wilson:

I love it. So I would say I've given this some thought, and really, wellness is near and dear to my heart, in that historically it doesn't matter what company I've been in, wellness is so misunderstood because the majority of the companies I've worked in have always said, "Do this now for some benefit later."

Karen Wilson:

And I think that there's an opportunity since we are much more of an industry, as well as a company of immediate gratification. So how can we reinforce the behavior, not just by a claim, but by saying, "When you do these things, we're going to send you a check."

Karen Wilson:

Now, I don't know if that will ever happen in the public space to be very honest with you, but I do think that if a person got their PSA or their mammogram and they got a little check for $5 or $10, I guarantee you that they'd repeat that behavior in the sense that that's what we want them to do versus right now, everyone's paying a premium or paying to kind of play, so to speak. Even though preventative are covered at a hundred percent, I still have to drive to get there. I still have to take time off from work. And so people see it more as a takeaway than actually, I'm doing something for myself. 

Karen Wilson:

So I think that when I've given this some thought and what do I think would have the biggest bang and return, it would be really to re-shift the paradigm on how we deliver wellness.

Karen Wilson:

And so, again, that's a dream. Who knows where we'd go with it, but that's what I would do, at least in the short run.

Karen Wilson:

If I had to do think about it from a long-term perspective, I think that we've done great things in making... We've created a preventative medication list. So there isn't that barrier to people who need insulin or asthma drugs, those types of things. So that's not on the table, but I'd love to have some sort of travel benefit. Again, we are a rural community, so people have to take time away and drive places. So if we had something where somebody had to travel more than 25 or 30 miles in order to receive the benefit of the plan, even if it's for a mammogram or something, I would love to be able to do some sort of reimbursement, even if it's just for mileage.

Karen Wilson:

So those are the types of things that I think become barriers, at least in our area. That may not be the case for more urban situated higher ed institutions, but for rural, it's all of these other elements that people, they feel is a takeaway, that we try to shore up.

Ryan James:

Got it. Awesome. Well, we are at the end of our three questions. And Karen, I really appreciate you spending a little bit of time with me. I'm sure we probably could talk for a lot longer, but thank you for spending some time with me and our audience today. Really appreciate some of the insight and the thoughts that you've had from both private and public sector world. So I appreciate it very, very much.

Karen Wilson:

Thank you, Ryan. It's been a pleasure talking with you and I hope we get a chance to talk again.