What Will India Inc. Need to Fulfill Job Insurance Expectations of Frontline Blue-Collar Workers?

The Indian government is leaving no stone unturned to provide statutory recognition to gig workers via new labour law reforms. The formalisation of a huge percentage of the blue-collar workforce brings them under various outreach schemes, including accidental cover, health insurance, and workmen’s compensation.

The 2020 social security code law will also allow employers to voluntarily sign-up for the Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), even if they have less than the mandatory number of employees.

Through these legal norms, employers now have an opportunity to create a deeper and more impactful relationship with their blue-collar workers.

There is a war for talent in the market, and the new generation of blue-collar workers have specific job insurance expectations. To attract and retain them, companies must be ready to fulfil their expectations.

Enhanced Benefits Package

The scars of the Covid-19 lockdowns are fresh in their minds. Blue-collar workers suffered greatly in 2020, and continue to bear the brunt of the pandemic. Job loss, migration, health crises, and other predicaments hounded them. Demand for sustainable livelihoods has made the migrant workforce come back to work. But, guaranteed income and health insurance are their top priorities.

They want a comprehensive package consisting of life cover, health cover, and accidental coverage, to financially protect their family members. Providing such a package for a large workforce could be costly for companies, in terms of premiums payable.

They will need ways to optimise insurance costs. The HR departments might need to increase the headcount to manage worker benefits. In the absence of affordable policies, and a technology solution to manage all the paperwork and claims process, overhead expenditures might increase.

Personalised Insurance Policies

Recent events and workforce changes have created new job insurance expectations. To remain competitive, employers must provide workers with the flexibility to choose their insurance benefits, terms, and conditions.

For instance, workers should be able to include their family members, and opt for riders like critical illness benefit, or family income benefit. Jobs carrying high-risk factors where workers can injure themselves must come with accidental coverage.

This is particularly important as gig workers are now brought under the traditional benefit pool. Whether hired for short-term, on-contract, or as permanent employees, platform workers will need to be insured during their job tenure.

This means employers will need to offer flexible, on-demand insurance solutions to workers. For many companies, this means ensuring the insurers have all the data required and fully understand the risks they want to cover.

Inefficient worker data collection practices won’t suffice in this process. Insurance complexities might increase if a brand has foreign branches too. To enable a standard process, quality of service, and uniform coverage, they will need a centralised system.

High Demand for Smooth Digital Experience

Digital transformation is a high priority for India Inc. today. Companies are upskilling and re-skilling workers to handle new job roles. When every aspect of their work is going online, insurance offerings must be digitalised too.

It’s important to note that the older generations are adapting to new systems, whereas the younger workers were already born and raised digitally. Frictionless onboarding, document uploads, insurance detail tracking, and more need to be offered to workers.

One of their primary expectations from job insurance is seamless online claims processing at all times, to support them during crises.
For employers, this means having to rely on an insurer’s online capabilities if they don’t have a workforce management system. This renders them incapable of tracking the ROI of these packages, and employee feedback.

If companies offer insurance with a bad employee experience, it will only lead to dissatisfaction and loss of reputation. Those who might want to create their own apps to enable a digitised process will face higher costs.

Readily Available Information

Workers in need of insurance cover can’t wait to approach HR with their insurance-related queries. Many companies today have a distributed workforce, and it’s difficult for workers to find solutions while they complete their shifts.

To truly make a difference, it’s important to provide them with the necessary resources to know about various insurance products, processes involved, document requirements, and more. This information needs to be available at their fingertips in their mother tongues, to avoid confusion and misinformation.

For companies, this will translate into higher costs for content creation. They will have to create special teams to handle these queries 24/7, which will again increase overhead costs.

What Will It Take For The Employers?

The new-age job insurance expectations could increase operational overheads for companies if they don’t deploy a full-stack, end-to-end tech solution for insurance-centric requirements. They will need a single platform to manage and track the insurance needs of their distributed workforce online.

Betterplace empowers companies to provide flexible and customised insurance solutions, cost-effectively. Here are some ways in which we help employers create a difference:

• Simplified cross-platform integrations
• Affordable health coverage with premiums starting at ₹4.5/day
• Round-the-clock digital claims processing support
• Company branded platform
• Analytics
• A dedicated app to educate workers

Contact us to learn more.