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Engaging a Retail Workforce with Health Benefits
For employers with large frontline populations, engagement starts by making health and care support easy to access in the moments that matter. Mark Griffin, Chief HR Officer at BJ’s Wholesale Club, explains how the AI-powered Transcarent WayFinding® platform helps busy frontline team members get quick, trusted support when they need it.
3 things employers need to know about making health and care easier for frontline employees
Access must match the reality of retail work. At BJ’s Wholesale Club, most of the company’s 35,000 team members work on the front lines in clubs and distribution centers. That means the experience has to be trusted, easy to access, and help people confidently make decisions about their health - from the palm of their hand.
The One Place for Health and Care™ makes accessing care easy and reduces confusion. Employers can invest in programs to lower costs and improve outcomes, but if employees do not know where to go when they need help, that value is harder to realize. The WayFinding platform gives team members One Place to go for personalized answers, clear direction, on-demand access to care, and the right next step.
Agentic AI and 24/7 doctors help people move forward faster. When the experience feels natural and integrated, people can focus on getting the help they need instead of figuring out the technology. For time-starved workers, that simplicity matters. In just a few minutes, they can get trusted answers, schedule care, and move on with their day.
Take action: Evaluate whether your health and benefits experience gives employees One Place to go for trusted, personalized answers and next steps. For frontline workforces especially, the right experience should work on personal devices, feel intuitive to use, and help people move forward in real time.
Mark Griffin: Hi, I’m Mark Griffin. I’m the Chief HR Officer for BJ’s Wholesale Club.
The majority of our 35,000 team members are frontline retail team members who are on the floor in our clubs or in our distribution centers. They don’t have a company-issued computer. They have their personal device. And so that’s the challenge. It is hard to reach our team members in a retail environment.
The C-suite is very concerned about a couple of things. You have to provide good healthcare to stay competitive. We also have a purpose and a culture at BJ’s to take care of our team members and their families.
Transcarent has helped us with that by being innovative and by being out in front. Transcarent understands what’s broken in the healthcare system better than anyone I’ve talked to.
One way Transcarent has really helped us solve these problems is the navigation tool, WayFinding. You spend a lot of time and a lot of money figuring out the programs we want to put in place to help reduce costs of our overall claims. WayFinding helps direct our team members to the right place and answer their questions quickly.
A big benefit of WayFinding is the AI capability, and it’s natural. They’re engaged in the chat, and they’re engaged in the conversation. They don’t necessarily stop and think about whether it’s AI or not. It’s very seamless and integrated.
I think the ease of it, and the fact that they don’t need to remember where to go — they need to remember to go to one place — is really refreshing for them.
They’re time-starved. They don’t have time to be on the phone. They can get access and information about their healthcare literally on their 10-minute work break, and they can move on and schedule appointments and be very productive.
And that’s what has been a big value for our team members.
