Benefits Monopoly: Gaming Our Way to Smarter Benefits Strategies

While no one in healthcare has a Magic 8 ball to predict the future (though it'd be nice if we did), it doesn’t mean that employers can’t build a resilient benefits strategy. Kind of like in a game of Monopoly—if you play your cards right early on and make wise investments, you’ll fare better when life takes unexpected turns.

Did someone say game? It’s no secret that the Artemis team loves to have a little fun, so to demonstrate this philosophy, we literally brought a game of “Benefits Monopoly: The Employer’s Dilemma” to the Conference Board’s Annual Employee Health Care Conference.  

With over 100 benefits and HR leaders in the room, we split everyone into teams and assigned them a “company” with some quick stats on their company’s profile:

The objective was to “future-proof” their benefits design as much as possible by allocating their monopoly money across six categories of spend:

Once each company finalized their budget allocations, an unanticipated market shock (dun dun dunnn) was revealed, leaving each company to reflect on how well they fared given their benefits strategy. How was each company meant to know how to optimally allocate their monopoly dollars to weather the storm, you might ask? Well...the devil is in the data.

Four key insights for "futureproofing" your benefits strategy

Our workshop attendees walked away with a few key insights from a couple rounds of Benefits Monopoly:

1. Look for the “tells” in your data: the most valuable insights often hide in subtle data patterns.

2. Know yourself: Understanding your organization's unique profile is essential for anticipating headwinds and evaluating risk.

3. One-size-does-not-fit-all: The most defensive benefits strategy for one company will not be the same for another.

4. Intentional planning beats reactive decision-making: Plan for things to not go as planned. Make informed and measured course corrections.

Want to play?

Next week, we'll be taking the show on the road to the Conference Board in San Diego. If you want to try your hand at Benefits Monopoly, join us there for our pre-conference workshop and see if you'll be able to find the clues in the data to outsmart Mr. Monopoly!