Summary

A pharmaceutical company was about to roll out student loan repayment—until they actually looked at the data and realized it was the parents and grandparents carrying the loans, not their employees. 

That one insight changed everything about how they approached financial wellness. In this episode, Kelsey Willock sits down with Tom Ellis, VP of Total Rewards at Emplify Health, who has spent over 20 years building people programs inside some of the largest health systems in the country—from Tennessee to Maine to Florida and now Wisconsin. 

Tom is one of those rare total rewards leaders who is equally comfortable talking about data warehouses and frontline employees living paycheck to paycheck. Together, Kelsey and Tom get into why so many elegant benefits programs fall apart when they hit real employee lives, how to build a direct behavioral health partnership that actually works (his prevented eight suicidal ideations in its first year), why HR is so bad at telling its own story, and where the future of benefits is heading when it comes to flexibility and shared accountability. If you design, measure, or communicate benefits programs, Tom's perspective will stay with you.

Timestamps

• 00:56 Tom's first paycheck and how growing up without money shapes his work
• 04:11 The student loan assumption that data completely upended
• 06:41 Why data matters for baselines and measuring what's actually working
• 08:30 The ED utilization problem they accidentally created through education
• 11:03 The "messy middle" of employee lives and why programs break there
• 12:40 Building a direct behavioral health partnership that prevented eight suicides
• 15:07 How to actually tell the story of benefits up to executives
• 18:32 Where benefits are heading: flexibility, choice, and shared accountability

Takeaways

• Before building a program, get the data to confirm the problem actually exists the way you think it does
• Design for the "messy middle" of real employee lives, not the theoretical average
• Measure the efficacy of every intervention so you can tell the story when leadership asks
• Pair quantitative data with employee stories; both are needed to make the case stick
• Build shared accountability into benefits so employees have a clear role to play in the outcome

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-ellis007/

Company website: https://www.emplifyhealth.org

Sponsor

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• (00:56) - Tom's first paycheck and how growing up without money shapes his work