It is not an HR number. It is a scheduling number, an RO number, and a Monday-morning number.
Most benefits vendors quote participation rates because they have nothing more interesting to say. They will brag about 60%, 70%, sometimes 80% if they squint at the data right. The number sits in a deck, the decision-maker nods, and nobody connects it to what actually happens on the service drive at 7:15 a.m.
Elysian plans run at 94% average participation. We lead with it, but not because it is a trophy. We lead with it because above a certain participation threshold the plan stops being a benefit and starts being part of how the store runs.
If only half of your techs are using the plan, you are paying for coverage that most of your floor does not actually touch. The Saturday call-out pattern does not change. The advisor who is running on four hours of sleep because his kid has an ear infection and urgent care closed at 9 p.m. is not getting a telemedicine visit that Sunday night. He is calling in Monday morning and you are covering his lane with overtime.
A 60% participation plan helps the 60% who opt in. It does not change how the store feels.
When 9 out of 10 people on your floor can text a board-certified clinician at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday and get seen with $0 co-pay, three things happen that nobody puts on a benefits invoice:
The Sunday-night routine changes. The strep throat, the sinus infection, the pink eye, the UTI — these get handled the night before they turn into a Monday call-out. 50+ routine conditions are treatable by telemedicine. That covers the overwhelming majority of what used to pull your team off the schedule.
The spouse and the kids are covered too. Family members can enroll under the same plan. A tech is not leaving the bay at 10 a.m. to take his daughter to the pediatrician when he can hand her the phone at home. Family health is the hidden driver of half your call-outs. Cover the family, cover the schedule.
Behavioral support is on the shelf. The F&I manager who is grinding through a divorce, the service advisor whose spouse just got a diagnosis — they have a confidential channel. You do not want to know the details and you should not. You do want them to have somewhere to go. With a behavioral-health network built into the plan, they do.
Participating dealerships report meaningful movement on the metrics that show up in the P&L. Ochs, Inc., reports aggregate program results of 26% lower employee health costs, 28% fewer sick days, and 30% fewer workers’ comp and disability claims. Those are program-level figures and individual dealer results will vary, but the direction is consistent and the mechanism is obvious: people who get routine care early do not become claims later.
Sick days on the service drive are not soft cost. They are lost labor hours, covered lanes, cranky advisors, and slow RO turn times. A 28% reduction in sick days on a 60-person rooftop is not a wellbeing statistic. It is real hours back on the schedule.
We do not have a gimmick. The plan runs this way because the design removes the friction that kills participation on every other benefit:
Employees pay nothing out of pocket. The dashboard is simple and available in 60 languages, with 250+ tutorial videos for the team that learns better by watching than by reading. Telemedicine is $0 co-pay, 24/7, with board-certified clinicians on the other end. Claims information is in the employee’s pocket, not in an HR drawer. Patient advocacy is a phone call, not a process.
Remove every reason not to use it, and people use it.
If you want to see what participation looks like on your specific rooftop, fifteen minutes is all it takes to walk through the numbers.
We will walk through the operational impact on a store your size.
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