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How Zoom transformed its employee wellness benefits program into a top-ranked Lifestyle Spending Account solution

Get the recap from HR Tech and hear how Zoom revamped its employee wellness benefits program with Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs).

5
 Min Read 
• 
7/4/23

Transforming an employee wellness benefits program to support a growing, global workforce

Zoom has exploded since the pandemic. The communications platform went from a nice to have for most enterprises to a necessity almost overnight. It’s no surprise that over the last couple of years, Zoom’s workforce has grown significantly in response with 10,000 employees located in 20 different countries worldwide. With a rapidly growing number of employees, the company set out to transform its employee benefits program to better support diverse and distributed needs. 

At HR Tech Conference 2022 in Las Vegas, Jason Fan, CEO, and co-founder at Forma sat down with Sheila Krueger, Head of Global Benefits at Zoom to discuss how to use Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) to support employees in times of need. Below is a summary of that discussion, detailing how Zoom retooled an existing wellness program into a holistic LSA solution to meet the unique needs of its expanding, global team.

Creating a benefits program meaningful for people throughout their lives 

Having conducted employee engagement surveys and speaking with employees during open enrollment, the Zoom HR team discovered that employees were struggling with vendor fatigue and that the existing programs had low engagement. As a means to better utilize benefits dollars and support a workforce in different life stages, Zoom launched a “wellness carousel” program. 

Krueger explained the concept, saying “Some folks get on that carousel right out of college. They're looking at student loan repayment. Or maybe you’re married and have a couple of kids. You’re paying a mortgage, but also want to save money for your kids' college.  You get into folks rounding out their career and maybe want a long-term care plan. Putting a pot of money for this plan, a pot of money for that plan, and paying a premium over and over and over again had really low engagement and wasn't working. Being able to put together a benefits plan that lets people pick and choose from one pot of money just seemed like a great idea.”

Then the pandemic hit, and the company needed a scalable way to maximize choices for their growing number of employees now working at home.

Retooling a wellness benefit into a holistic Lifestyle Spending Account solution 

At the time, the organization was offering a wellness program with $300 a month available to all employees across the globe for gym memberships. However, the benefit only had about 10% utilization.

“Our executive team reached out to us and said, we need to figure out a way that we can support all of our employees while they're at home. And what they offered to do was help us to kind of convert what we had as our wellness program at that time. We reached out to Forma. We started looking at it as how can we start to really make this a holistic benefit for everybody and build it on our five pillars of wellness rather than having it just be physical wellness,” Krueger noted.  

Partnering with Forma, Zoom expanded the pre-existing wellness program to include an array of Lifestyle Spending Accounts focused on the company's five wellness pillars: physical, mental, financial, social, and work. The new LSAs covered a much broader spectrum of options, from daily food deliveries, gym memberships, and office equipment, to childcare support accessible via the Forma platform. 

“Being able to make changes over time, adding additional things throughout, and the flexibility of the program made it a lot more interesting. The fact that there is a store in the platform where employees could purchase physical items made it a lot easier for them to access funds. Having the flexibility throughout the pandemic, as things kind of waxed and waned, we were able to make those adjustments on the fly."

Sheila and Zoom’s HR team continued to maximize flexibility and choice through Forma’s LSA program offerings. For example, when Zoom announced the partnership with Facebook Portal, Forma quickly adjusted the LSA eligibility to allow for purchasing via the Facebook Portal. 

Providing Lifestyle Spending Accounts delivers results, ranking as the top choice for Zoom employee benefits

Since its inception, Zoom’s LSA program has continued to prove valuable. The company has saved over $125K in marketplace discounts and increased spend utilization across all flexible accounts from 10% to 83%.

Furthermore, Zoom conducted a conjoint analysis in 2022 to see how its workforce perceived the value of benefits, the results of which Krueger called “amazing.” 

Krueger noted, “We had this great response for the LSA account asking, ‘What would happen if we took that away?’ And of course, that was not a good thing. The score dropped dramatically. But also on the other side of that was asking, ‘What's the perceived value if we increased funds by $100 or by $200?’ And we just kept seeing that rating go up and up and up.”  Krueger went on to say, “For us to get back results and literally from every country, the Lifestyle Spending Account was the number one benefit that we offered.”

The results speak for themselves. 

“I just don't think we can emphasize enough the flexibility of Forma. It's not just about how awesome that is for your employees, but it's great because the administration is just practically zero. Everything's very clearly defined on the portal. The Forma support team is amazing. If people have questions, we direct them to the Forma team and they're able to handle that. So that has cut down on our administration time as well. Rather than having individual point solutions, maybe shift those dollars into an LSA program.”

- Sheila Krueger, Head of Global Benefits at Zoom

Watch the full talk.