Many claims processing organizations rely on distributed workforces to save costs on office space, increase their access to labor, and have a broader talent pool to recruit out of. There are plenty of benefits of this approach, but there are also risks.
For health insurance claims processing organizations, here is some information to consider. Two different studies looking at telecommuting found the same conclusion: remote employees are at a substantially higher risk of disengagement.
Gallup and Enkata both looked at employee engagement levels for in-office and remote workers. What Gallup found was that people who work remotely full time were twice as likely to be actively disengaged: 23 percent of telecommuters were in this category, compared to only 12 percent of office based workers.
This result ties exactly to what Enkata found when we studied productivity data of insurance claims adjustors. To create a proxy for engagement, Enkata looked at workers who were away from their computer for more than 25 percent of the time that they reported themselves as processing claims. We considered these people as "actively disengaged." What Enkata found was that 17.4 percent of remote claims processors fell into this category, compared to only 9 percent of office based workers.
Other Enkata research has found that managers have a big impact on engagement levels. Within a given company, teams of claims processors with good managers showed higher engagement and higher productivity regardless of the location of the employee. Remote employees were always at a higher risk of being disengaged, but better managers had better productivity scores across their teams.
Claims processing managers with remote workers should pay attention to engagement levels on their team because it the damage from a actively disengaged workforce is tremendous. Not only is their productivity lower, but the claims payment error rate for disengaged employees is substantially higher.
Flagging engagement can be very difficult to spot. Enkata found some workers would skip key steps, in order to get to their productivity target so they could stop working for the day. Managers who manage by watching activity reports and dashboards are unlikely to spot or correct flagging engagement, and be stuck wondering why some employees are struggling with high error rates despite repeated training.
Claims operations managers who ignore engagement are taking a tremendous risk. The Gallup data indicates that up to a quarter if their remote workers may need more interactions and encouragement. The Enkata data shows that disengaged workers are substantially less productive and more error prone than engaged workers.
Dan Enthoven is chief marketing officer at Enkata.