Dawn Beaudin has spent more than three decades committed to
"One of the things that has been a personal passion of mine for years is helping people save and making sure they have a secure future," says Beaudin, one of this year's Excellence in Benefits Award winners.
Fresh out of college in 1993, Dawn Beaudin joined Hyatt's HR team and was tasked with introducing the company's new
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As VP of benefits since 2013, Beaudin has used her leadership role to broaden benefits and policies that give Hyatt's large, diverse workforce well-rounded, lasting support: From improving access to primary care and surgery, to setting up
"These are the things that make me proud and excited to come into work every day, because I know we're making an enormous difference," she says. "Our purpose as a company is to care for people so they can be their best. Based on what we hear from our colleagues, they feel that Hyatt is making an investment in them. They can see it, they can feel it, and it makes them want to stay."
Beaudin discusses the financial benefit achievement that has meant the most, healthcare offerings that make a big impact, and how younger generations and tech are changing employee expectations.
What financial benefit are you most proud of adding?
We were finally successful last year [in adding] auto enrollment to our 401k. Everybody has financial struggles at some point in their lives, and if your financial health is struggling, then everything is going to be a challenge for you. I've seen colleagues reach out who have not saved — they worked for Hyatt for years, and they have nothing when they walk out the door. Those stories absolutely break my heart. [Now] we've got 96% of our new-hire population participating in the 401(k) plan, which gives me such an incredible sense of pride.
We've done something that I know is going to help these people years down the road — not only those who were probably highly paid, knew the benefits of a 401(k) and were saving on their own, but all the people who thought they couldn't, who are now doing something for their future.
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How are you also putting quality healthcare within reach?
The two words I use most often when I talk about our health plan are accessibility and affordability. We want to make sure that our colleagues can afford to get care when they need it, and that we're removing as many barriers as we possibly can from doing that.
We have [health payment platform] Paytient, which we give to people to make sure that they can go to the doctor or the emergency room, or pick up a prescription. They might not have the money in their pocket that day, but they can use that Paytient card and then pay that back over payroll deductions, and we have tremendous utilization of that benefit. Employees have said [this allows them to] afford the medicine they need and take their kids to the doctor, and they don't have to worry.
We've also put in Lantern, which is a surgical COE. When people use Lantern, their surgery is free. There too, we've had people reach out to us and say, 'I've been struggling with knee pain for 10 years, I needed to have surgery, and I wouldn't have been able to do it if it weren't for this benefit. It's a great feeling to know that we removed some of these barriers and made something affordable for them so that they were able to take care of themselves or their family.
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What are some changes you've made as technology has shifted employees' expectations regarding benefits?
There's a sense of immediacy — employees expect to be able to get very concierge-level service without having to wait. They want things to be done online, they don't necessarily want to talk to someone, so we've tried to drive as much as we can to have it be digital, to have virtual options, things that, maybe traditionally, you didn't have when we had an old-fashioned healthcare structure. We've done a lot of revamping our intranet site to make sure that information is available online for people so they can look it up themselves.
We've [also] made a public-facing site that has all of our benefit information so that anybody can see what we offer. We used to have a lot of our information behind a firewall — the employee had to log in to see it — but we we want to put it out there so employees, spouses or dependents can see it as well, along with prospective hires so that they can go out and see all the great things that we offer and what that employee value proposition looks like.
