The month of April is dedicated to Stress Awareness. Stress comes in many forms, can be felt in different places, and can affect everything from relationships to decision-making. With mental health becoming a priority in today's workplace, it's imperative we take the time to recognize the causes and forms of stress so we can actively work towards reducing them.

What are the most common forms of stress?

Stress can take a seemingly infinite number of forms. However, according to the Benefits Canada 2021 Healthcare Survey, the top five are:

  1. Personal Finances (36%)
  2. Workload (34%)
  3. Personal Relationships (31%)
  4. Health Concerns (personal or family) (31%)
  5. Work-life Balance (30%)

A lot of employers are aware of workplace causes of stress, with obvious ones being workload and work-life balance. Although these may seem inevitable, there are ways employers can reduce stress for their team without sacrificing productivity or spending a fortune. In some cases, implementing methods to reduce workplace stress can increase overall productivity.

Reducing stress by tackling pain points

There are a few actionable pain points employers can focus on in order to reduce stress for their team. Reducing the impact of these pain points can provide your team with higher morale, a more positive work environment/relationship, and improve overall work quality and productivity. So how can you fix pain points such as personal finances and health concerns?

Personal Finances

It’s time to consider benefits as a part of compensation. In today’s workforce, benefits can make or break a candidate accepting a job offer. Benefits can also have a massive impact on personal finances. When a plan is built with rigidity and poor coverage, it can force your team to pay more out of pocket for their medical expenses (nothing matches the stress of paying medical bills on a budget).

Another thing to consider is your plan’s rising premiums – especially if you’re asking your team to put some skin in the game by sharing the cost of their benefits. All of a sudden those benefits aren’t so beneficial and actually become a drain on your teams’ overall compensation – creating more opportunities for financial stress.

Health Concerns

This section kind of speaks for itself. If you have subpar coverage or limitations on your plan, your team may be more concerned when health issues arise. Longer-term health issues can also drain their total coverage amount quickly, leaving them with not only health concerns but with the previously mentioned financial concerns as well. Giving your team the freedom to spend their benefits where they want and providing a plan with great value allows them to jump on any health concerns early with little thought, lowering this stressor.

What’s the solution?

If you haven’t guessed, Blended Benefits are the solution of course! All sarcasm aside, as we talked about in this blog providing your team with a plan that provides flexibility, autonomy, and value can increase the overall value of their compensation. It allows them to take care of health concerns early and often, gives them the freedom to choose how to spend their money, and saves them (and probably your business) money too.

With no rising premiums, no category limits, and an extensive list of eligible expenses your team can get the full value of every dollar they spend, and choose where they want to spend it and how they want to spend it. Our plans are the epitome of simplicity as well - Blendable does all the heavy lifting for you!

Did this blog lower your stress?

We sure hope so. Finding out about amazing benefits sure brings us some joy, but we might be a bit biased. If you want to learn more about Blended Benefits, our amazing team, what else we offer, or just to talk about your day, we’d love to get in touch! Be sure to toss us a follow on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to stay up to date on all things Blendable!

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