Choose a health partner for SME wellness plans

Employees who feel valued and cared for are employees who feel happy, efficient and productive. That is why looking after their whole health is key to a successful international SME.

But finding new ways to improve employees' well-being at a time when their lives have become more complex than ever can be a real challenge. So how can small and medium-sized enterprises meet their employees' needs? At Cigna, we can reveal that the answer lies in collaborating with a partner that specialises in health services. Keep reading to find out why.

Health is everything. Feeling healthy and full of energy is what enables us to enjoy life, be motivated, work safely and have the desire to progress in the world of work. SMEs must understand the importance of taking an active role in their employees' comprehensive care, because ensuring that there is a balance in all the areas of employees' health produces great benefits in terms of commitment and business productivity.

In this context and, with a view to setting themselves apart in an increasingly competitive market, SMEs must invest in wellness programmes that offer more than a standard benefits package. However, taking that step is not always easy and can be a challenge for SMEs if they do not go about it with the right healthcare partner. With the support of specialised companies, smaller companies will have access to the resources, knowledge and advice they need to grow and improve the effectiveness of their health plans.

In this sense, having a specialised partner will help them to develop, for example, tailor-made programmes for special groups, such as patients with chronic conditions, while improving the support for looking after employees and offering increasingly comprehensive health benefits. In short, they help to design the strategy that the SME needs, by focusing resources on what is truly necessary.

In order to make objective decisions with respect to well-being, we need experts who know how to identify employees' needs and how to meet them. And that is exactly what we do at Cigna – we advise SMEs to help design the health plan that best suits them. But what is the aim of this? The aim is to respond directly to existing needs and generate, as a result, a return on investment. Click on this link to see some of the options available.

However, to become a healthy SME, they must accept that although their teams are smaller than those of major corporations, they are made up of individuals with very different lives and concerns that can affect their overall well-being.

Organisations like Cigna, which specialise in providing health solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises, have a lot to say and offer during this process. We help to raise these entities awareness and opt for health solutions that are adapted to their employees' individual needs. We also provide them with different whole healthcare-oriented solutions, which focus on prevention and adopting a healthy lifestyle.

And, in turn, the support of a healthcare provider also facilitates access to state-of-the-art health and wellness tools. So at Cigna, we offer these companies solutions which have shown increased success, such as, for example, the Global Telehealth service available with the Cigna Wellbeing App^TM.

This digital application has become a real investment for the success of SMEs: it offers employees and their families easy and safe access to quality care, from the best health professionals, any time and anywhere. It is vital that there is an understanding within the workplace that looking after employees’ whole health also means looking after their family well-being. If their nearest and dearest are looked after, employees will have fewer worries and, as a result, will be able to concentrate better on their work duties.

Each and every one of the reasons given for working on employees' comprehensive care with the support of a specialist are crucial for SMEs, as the current context presents new health challenges to which they must respond. Addressing these challenges with a health partner like Cigna also means offering employees different benefits packages, by balancing the financial cost and resources with the objectives of the health plan: offering a wide high-quality medical network, premium customer experience, benefits focused on comprehensive health care or guidance during the implementation of a wellness programme.

A partner which specialises in health services also helps to educate people management teams to promote a true wellness culture in which each employee feels supported and motivated to take care of themselves. It also encourages the entire workforce to give their best, by achieving the SME's business results and creating a better future for the company.

At Cigna, we have the health plan that your SME needs. Contact us using this link and we will help you develop a made-to-measure wellness plan to look after your team's whole health.