Do you actually know what your benefits cover?
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I complain about our health insurance every single time it changes. And if you asked me to explain exactly what changed, I’d need to pull up the packet and stare at it for a while. Please tell me I’m not the only one. This came up in my conversation with Gayle Martin on The Balanced Badass Podcast® this week. Gayle spent 27 years working in group benefits before starting TrueNorth Benefits Strategy, so she knows this stuff inside and out. At one point, we started talking about how many companies hand employees a benefits booklet during onboarding and then act like the job is done. Cool. You technically gave me the information. Do I know what any of it means or how to use it when something goes sideways? Different question. And it made me think about how often we do the same thing on our side. We pick a plan during open enrollment, check whether our doctor is covered, and then don’t look at the details again until we really need something. Probably not the best plan. I learned that a few years ago when I found myself in the emergency room with a pulmonary embolism. Now imagine you’re already so burned out that opening your laptop makes your whole body tense. You’re trying to decide whether you need time away, but now you also have to figure out what leave you qualify for, whether you have short-term disability, what happens to your insurance, and how much income you’d lose. You’re doing all of that with a brain that already feels like mashed potatoes. I want you to give future you a tiny bit of help this week. Set aside just 15 minutes and find four things:
Save the documents somewhere outside your work account when company policy allows. Put the useful phone numbers in your contacts. If there’s one specific person in HR or at the insurance company who can answer questions, save that too. I’m not asking you to suddenly understand every deductible, exclusion, and form. I just don’t want the first step to be hunting through an HR portal while you’re crying in the parking lot before work. If 15 minutes feels like too much right now, log in and download the booklet. You can search it later when you know what you need. Also, pay attention to how hard this information is to find. Do the instructions make sense? Could you ask a question without getting passed around to four people? Would you feel safe telling HR that your mental health is affecting your ability to work? Do you trust your manager to respond like a caring person if you needed leave? That tells you quite a bit about the company you’re working for. Gayle and I get into this in the full episode. We talk about why benefits education can’t end at onboarding, what employers should be doing differently, and what you can look for in your own plan before you need help. We also talk about Gayle’s burnout and what it took for her to leave corporate leadership after 27 years. She had to figure out what she was good at, what gave her energy, and what she wanted work to look like now. I know that part of the conversation will hit for anyone who’s wondering whether they can build something different after spending years inside one professional identity. We’re bringing sexy back to employee benefits. Because knowing your options so you can make an intentional choice for you IS sexy. Then go find your booklet. Future you has enough going on. Take care, Tara P.S. If Gayle's story about figuring out what comes next hit a little close to home, I have 6 private Career Reboot Strategy Sessions left, all in October. After that, the 1:1 version retires. Two hours with me to figure out what's actually going on and what your next move is. |