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Why Included Health made its own employees the case study · Beyond the Paycheck

• Beyond the Paycheck - Jim O'Gorman Recorded September 10, 2026 Kelsey Willock: Welcome Jim O'Gorman, Chief People Officer at Included Health. We are so excited to have you today. To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit more about your current role, your background, and where you're calling in from today. Jim O'Gorman: Sure, thanks, Kelsey. It's great to be here. I appreciate the invitation. Yeah, my name is Jim, and I'm the Chief People Officer at Included Health. And that includes all things related to people: talent attraction, talent development, talent retention, as well as internal communication. I sit here at Included Health. We're based, the company's based in San Francisco, but I sit in Los Angeles, and about 93% of our workforce does work remotely. We're primarily in virtual care, virtual health care, and making sure that we help employers provide great care to their employees regardless of where they sit. Kelsey Willock: So I have so many follow-up questions for you, especially given the world of healthcare is getting so much more complex and interesting. But before we get there, I want to take a step into the past and get to know you a little bit better. So if you'll indulge me, can you tell me a little bit about your first job ever? And if you remember what you spent your first paycheck on. Jim O'Gorman: Gosh, the first job ever. I am the youngest of six children, five boys, and we were the paper boy mafia of Hilton, New York, which was a very small commuter town outside of Rochester, New York. So we owned the paper route. I was a paper boy before I even remember what age I was. My older brothers had like the monopoly on this. So, and then I was always their backup. And then I inherited the paper route when I was a teenager when they went off to college. So that was my first job. And we always spent our money at the Hilton Carnival when I was a kid. Like it came to the carnival came to town. I'm totally dating me. Newspapers delivered to your doorstep, carnivals in a small town. Like this is like ages gone by, but that was my first job. Kelsey Willock: It sounds like a delightful time though, and what a wonderful way to spend your money. Jim O'Gorman: Yeah, it's great. Kelsey Willock: How do you think your early story and relationship with money has influenced how you make decisions for your people, whether it's supporting them, making decisions around pay and benefit and beyond? Jim O'Gorman: You know, it makes a huge difference to the work that I do today. I think every person out there has had an interaction, likely an unsuccessful interaction with the healthcare system and the rising cost of healthcare. That has certainly impacted me, impacted my family. My mother had a long illness of Parkinson's disease, pretty debilitating, the financial constraints that put on my parents and my family has impacted me and like how that can really paralyze and debilitate a family, the cost of healthcare. And it has driven me to where I am today is how do you create affordable health care that raises the standard of healthcare regardless of where you sit in the world? That you don't need to be in a major metropolitan area to get great healthcare. And I think technology today is providing access to healthcare and making big changes there. But it is certainly grounded in how I grew up and the implications of having a financial burden in our household, having that sit over our household, caregiving and the financial constraints that that puts on a family, certainly has shaped me fundamentally today. Kelsey Willock: So I wanna dig a little bit deeper into that. And we were talking a little bit about this. Healthcare is becoming more and more complex. It is very rare that I have a conversation with a senior leader that doesn't mention to me, you know, the rising cost of healthcare. How are you thinking about this new age of healthcare where we continue to see high cost increase, specifically ones in which affect and essentially are costing companies more. How do we continue deliver high quality care in this healthcare inflation forward world? Jim O'Gorman: Yeah, I believe it needs to be disrupted. I think we are certainly in an important inflection point in our healthcare system, particularly how employers are required and mandated to provide benefits to their employees and the cost constraints and really the rising cost that is not sustainable and it's hitting the bottom lines of all of our companies. And that cost that is hitting the P&L of employers is only getting transferred to the employee whose rising premiums are crazy. I was talking to a CHRO yesterday and they were getting their benefits renewal and they're going to see a 52% increase year over year of their premiums. That 52% is typically going to get just transferred to an employee. So it's unsustainable. And I think technology is the answer. And I think corporate America is the answer. I think that the real change, the real disruption has to happen in the healthcare system with companies and forcing both payers and providers to change the way they think about their plan design and their plan costs. Today an employee is in the middle of that. It's incredibly confusing. You have a doctor that you like, but they're not covered by insurance. Companies, the only way they can drive costs down for the last decade is to change insurance providers switching from a Cigna to an Anthem, and that creates a ton of disruption and actually impacts care. It has a huge implication on care. People then have disruption with their provider, tend to delay care. And this happens year over year as employees, employers change their insurance providers. Today that can change. I think today we can create a more patient-centric or member-centric system that doesn't put the patient in the middle of the provider, the doctor and the payer, the insurance company. And it's actually more member centric. And I think the area of alternative plan design, where lots of companies are thinking about how they change the design of their plans, how they create the right financial incentives for their employees while reducing total cost of care is data and AI is going to help us here and is going to eliminate some of the complexities that insurance companies have created for the last several years, and I think corporate America can lead the way. Kelsey Willock: You also mentioned a really important point around the financial stress that the situation is costing specifically employees. Can you tell me a little bit about how important financial health for employees is to the company? And, you know, what do you guys think you're getting right today? Jim O'Gorman: Yeah, we focus on what we call mind, body and wallet, that all three need to be healthy and considered. And one, your employee benefit package and what we offer to our employees, but also the work that we do with employers. So our customers, our CHROs and chief financial officers, we work with them to understand how do you drive better cost and care of your employee. I think gone are the days, particularly in now this remote workforce, where it's lunch and ping pong tables that are retaining employees. I think healthcare is the thing that needs to be the differentiator from best in class employees, and retaining a great worker, a great performer is gonna require you to provide them great health care. And that includes healthcare, mind, body, and wallet. You can't simply just offer health care and then a mental health, behavioral health package off to the side or an EAP. It has to be longitudinal, mind and body care, having your doctor understand what is happening from a behavioral health perspective, having access to that data is important and will drive costs down, as well as thinking of the financial benefits that employees need. They have to have stability across their health, their behavioral health, their physical health, and their financial health in order to be high performing. If those weaken for an employee, they're not going to be fully engaged at work and there's going to be implications to how they perform at work. The three are connected, I should say. And we spend a lot of time making sure our employees have the right benefits the most across mind, body, wallet and we spend a lot of time advising CHROs in that area as well. Kelsey Willock: Can you tell me about a specific benefit or policy that you saw specifically remove a barrier that was getting in the way of your people doing their best work? Whether that has to do with mental, physical, financial, or otherwise? Jim O'Gorman: Yeah, I think for the last decade, CHROs and total rewards leaders had to go off and get point solutions or very kind of specific point solutions on top of their health care, meaning they would offer health care, but then they would have a separate vendor for behavioral health. Maybe that was a vendor that was providing them therapy, a separate vendor that was providing them a musculoskeletal, like a Hinge, or a separate benefit that was providing them additional women's health or cancer care or specialty health. And what that was creating over the last 10 years is a ton of complexity for the patient, for the member, for the employee. They had to go to all these different point solutions, but actually they're all connected. One's mental health, physical health, even if they're dealing with a long-term debilitating disease, like diabetes, that all has to be longitudinal. What we've done here at Included Health is to collapse that together. And our employees and their dependents now have free access to all of our products. So we offer that at no cost to our employees. We think we need to be the case study. Like, how does this one create a better employee, a more engaged and higher retained employee? But two, drive our cost, our total cost of care down, our benefits line down. And so I'm not dealing with the double digit increases year over year because of the things that we offer to our employees. They also have high engagement and low, low attrition. I don't necessarily think that's just strictly because of our benefits. I think there's other things, obviously, that we do, but we know that our product has driven down costs as well as it is a key retainer, key retention vehicle for our employees at Included Health. Kelsey Willock: I love the positioning of our employees are our case study. When your employees are also your customer, what better way to understand what actually moves the needle than, you know, being the user of your own product? You can really tell if it's making an impact or not. So I think that's a fabulous way to position it. Jim O'Gorman: We have a people strategy. You know, like many CHROs, we have a people strategy. But what I love about the work that I do, one is I sell into the CHRO channel. So it's something that I'm passionate about and our customer is my career, my livelihood that I am passionate about. But two, in our strategy, we say that we demonstrate the value of Included Health. Like anything that we are doing and selling to our customer is being also provided to all of our employees that we can demonstrate this value, that I can get up on stage and not just kind of like sing a poetic sales pitch, but actually demonstrate the value of Included Health and how that has impacted, you know, our three thousand employees nationwide. Kelsey Willock: How are you making this internal case for investment in what's often, you know, investment in significant, has a significant price tag associated with it? For example, when we think about investing in a sales tool that might, you know, 10x the ability for our sales team to reach new leads, it's different for investing in people within the organization. So can you talk a little bit about when the spreadsheet doesn't obviously support the investment of these specific initiatives and how you've been so effective when, you know, bringing in conversations with CFOs, CEOs, and more. Jim O'Gorman: Absolutely. I think, of course, the CHRO role and the people team is the most strategic part of a business, particularly of your highest cost on your income statement and your cost is people. You know, for us, 75% of our costs are people related and employee driven. And so you have to be at the table, you have to understand your business. And that is something that I, you know, been able to do my entire career, like to be close partner to the CEO and make sure the people strategy is at the table. And I think that's changed significantly in my time as an HR leader. My biggest advice and my biggest learning is that the CHRO has to be the best long-term planner in the business. You have to have, I have a three-year plan, stick to that plan. Of course it's dynamic. You have to modify that plan based on financial results. But I have to give line of sight to where I want to be in out years. And my most important strongest partner and colleague needs to be the CFO. Like we have to be in lockstep and aligned philosophically on first principles of who we are as a business. And then I build my people strategy from there and I get aligned with the CFO and with my CEO of like this is what we agree to. This is a team sport. People work, people leadership is a team sport. It's not just my responsibility. If we are agreeing as a leadership team that this is where we want to be in the next two, three years, then these are the types of things that I think we as a team need to prioritize and invest in. Do you agree? And how do we make a plan for those investments over a two, three-year period? I think it's essential to do that with your leadership team and with your comp committee and your board, the compensation committee. I work very closely with the compensation committee. But if you're a CHRO that is looking to attain more investment for your people, my biggest advice is to think longer term. Those requests coming in year and requests that come in 12 months are very hard for an organization to manage. And you have to demonstrate long-term thinking to be a successful CHRO. Kelsey Willock: Love that and it's just so actionable. And it gives, you know, our listeners the opportunity to ask the first question, which is are we aligned? And have we had these conversations? And do we even have the same values alignment? And then from there, it's the strategy planning, it's the thinking more long term. It seems so obvious, but I think within organizations it can be so easy to find ourselves in siloed spaces within it. Jim O'Gorman: I think it's really easy for people to also, leaders, for CFOs, CEOs to deflect the people choices to the CHRO and make it just the responsibility of the CHRO. And I think it's important for us to say, no, this is a team sport. Like, we have to be in this together. I can execute and strategize and facilitate that, but we have to be in this together and not to concede that partnership is important, to set that partnership straight right from the start. Kelsey Willock: Can you tell me about an experiment that you ran in your benefit strategy that didn't go the way you expected? Jim O'Gorman: I think it comes down right now to equity for me. The market has changed. We offer equity. We're a privately held organization. And part of our philosophy is to have everyone have a long-term stake in the business. And for many years, equity was a key retention driver for employees, but the market has changed significantly. And so equity, what I'm finding is equity is becoming less of a performance and a retention vehicle. And it's catching me a little more flat-footed than I would have liked, than I would like to be. I think that in the markets that we're in, cash is becoming more important to employees than what equity was, and certainly in healthcare and health tech. And I am thinking deeply about what equity eligibility needs to look like, kind of forward thinking. And the work that I've done probably in the last 24 months is probably not reaping the benefit that I thought it would. Kelsey Willock: The answer might be the same for my next question, but super curious. What is a shift in compensation and benefits that you see coming that most HR leaders are not ready for? Jim O'Gorman: Well, yeah, I think for us, just where we're positioned in healthcare and how the market is changing. Obviously, equity is something I'm spending a lot of time on, but the biggest shift that I think will happen is how total rewards leaders will need to think differently about how they design their benefit, their healthcare benefits. That they need to be investigating an alternative plan design than the traditional designs that have existed over the last decade, and more than thinking about, I think high deductible plans are going to be challenged. And that you really need to start to seek out alternative ways to design your insurance, your healthcare insurance, because the current way is not working. We cannot see double digit, twenty, thirty, forty percent increases in insurance coverage. It is not sustainable for organizations. And I don't think you'll see that change come from insurance companies. I think the total rewards leaders need to understand the leverage that they have, particularly jumbo employers need to lead the way here. Kelsey Willock: And Jim, my last question for you is what's a final message that you'd like to leave with our audience? Jim O'Gorman: Do not underestimate the importance of healthcare and healthcare benefits to your team. I think over the next, you know, decade, this is going to be a critical driver in talent attraction and talent retention. And you need to start thinking about that now, and how do you use your healthcare as an important driver, not just in attracting talent, but making sure that your employees are taken care of. And that we have to be careful that for years we've just been transitioning costs from us to them. And it's becoming something that an employee can't, their income, their salaries are not rising at the level of cost that their healthcare is. And you need to really start taking a critical look at that and, you know, thinking different approaches to that. Kelsey Willock: Well, thank you so much, Jim. I sincerely appreciate all of your time and your candor. I've learned so much from you and I certainly feel like we could have another hour long conversation digging deeper into the world of healthcare. So perhaps we have another conversation someday to do that. Jim O'Gorman: It's a passion of mine. I enjoy it. So I appreciate your time, Kelsey. Kelsey Willock: Of course. Well, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and look forward to staying in touch. Jim O'Gorman: Thanks, you too.