2009 Benny Award Benefits Professional of the Year
Dawn Werle
Executive Director for Benefits Time Warner
New York, N.Y.
It's a long-standing joke in the industry that no kid ever dreams of growing up to be a benefits professional. But in Dawn Werle's case, the profession didn't appeal much to a new grad either.
When looking for her first job out of college, she recalls seeing a listing in a local newspaper.
"It said something about consulting," she says. "I'd had some friends in college interview for jobs in management consulting, so when I got there for the interview I asked, 'What is this?' And they said benefits consulting."
Though still somewhat unsure, she says, "They said it was a job and they'd pay me, and I said, 'Well, that sounds like a winner.' So that was that. I ended up in benefits, just by happenstance."
Luckily for Werle and the benefits industry, that random twist of fate put her on the path toward a successful, rewarding career working at some of the nation's top companies, led her to her current position as the executive director for benefits at media/entertainment-giant Time Warner and earned her the honor of EBN's 2009 Benefits Professional of the Year.
Since joining the company in 2005, Werle's tenure at Time Warner - a global media company whose brands include CNN, Time, Warner Brothers and HBO - has kept her spinning, literally. During the past 12 months, the company has undergone extensive changes as it spun off its cable operations and currently is in the process of spinning off AOL.
During these unprecedented financial times, Werle has been able to balance ramping Time Warner's benefit offerings while driving significant savings to the company. Her secret?
"Use reason and logic. After you've been in this profession for a while you know who the best consultants and best vendor partners are," Werle says. "After that, common sense goes a long way."
Drilling down on disability
One particularly important area where Werle's logical nature was key was in implementing an integrated model into Time Warner's disability management program.
"With integrated disability program, in my past life we'd put up a model that was 100% physician review," she says. "The premise was if a physician reviewed every claim they'd invariably find the ones that were going to be outliers."
Sounds great, right? Werle thought otherwise, saying such models aren't - you guessed it - logical.
"That doesn't work so well because a physician can't look at every case coming through, nor can all the nurses know which [disability] cases are going to go long. So I said, 'We know there's a Pareto group. Figure out the characteristics of the Pareto group and input those characteristics [into the disability management system] and when cases come in, it flags those for a different management track,'" she says.
Since the "Pareto group" are the "13% [of cases] that are going to drive 60% to 80% of your claims, why not put them on a heightened management track?" Werle continues. "You can't put integrated clinical resources on every claim; it's not pragmatic. And it's too expensive. Put those resources toward the cases we can pretty much predict are going to go longer than average and need more help. It's all logic. It works for the partners, it works for us and it works for employees."
It's hard to argue with Werle's logic - or her results. Since implementing the integrated strategy, Time Warner has reduced short-term disability durations and decreased long-term disability incidences by 11%.
Cleaning house
Werle also recently set about dusting up Time Warner's recordkeeping data in its retirement plan.
Recognizing the value of scale and consolidation of all financial plan recordkeeping with one vendor, Werle led the Time Warner team tasked with managing the transition. However, she notes: "If the data's not clean, you're hamstringing the vendor. You have to have clean data so we could have optimal availability for our active population."
Although just 57% of Time Warner's retirement plan data was considered completely accurate, or "clean," when the transition started, thanks to Werle's oversight, 96% of active employee data now is considered "clean" and employees can go to one Web site and see their 401(k), stock and model pension values.
"Employees value benefit more if they can log in and see their information right away," she says.
The effort must have seemed easy peasy for Werle, compared to her turn managing retirement benefits at PepsiCo in 2001. Upon accepting the position, senior managers told her, "Don't worry, pensions are really quiet right now, and we just put a lot of money into the plan. It will be fine."
It might have been, if not for 9/11, and the recession that followed that threw pension plans nationwide into turmoil. "It was the perfect storm that everyone always talks about," Werle remembers.
Steeled from that experience, Werle also has worked her magic on Time Warner's pension plan, reducing costs while enhancing employees' perception of the benefit.
Walking nine months in their shoes
While she has much to be proud of, Werle says one of her biggest achievements is helping to rebuild Time Warner's maternity care management program and similar programs for employees with chronic conditions.
In remaking the maternity program, Werle drew on not only logic but first-hand experience. As the mother of two, "I'd been through two maternity programs already, and been a recipient of the services. I knew that they don't really talk to you; they just want to know if you're high-risk," she says.
"So when I sat down and wrote the curriculum for the maternity program, I said, 'If I [were talking to] a girlfriend, what would I tell her about pregnancy?' I told the vendor, 'I'll roll my sleeves up and write this. You guys do the clinical parts; I'll do all the other stuff.'"
She sought to create a seamless service that expectant moms could trust. "Going through it, you can see how fractured these programs are, and there's no one to talk to. If you had someone you trusted, you'd call them and ask questions," she notes. "Because I know what I've been through as a mother, I used that to connect with moms. Make it interesting and something they'll want to use and the savings and participant satisfaction will come."
The results speak for themselves. The revamped maternity program has garnered high enrollment rates and a drop in readmission rates for maternities/neonates from 25% to 1%, due in large part to onsite NICU nurses.
In other care management areas, where Time Warner's care management programs previously reached approximately 5% of employees, they now reach 15%. Further, Werle and her team also designed an innovative autism program that includes coverage for applied behavioral therapies for children diagnosed with autism as well as a dedicated autism advocate, to help families navigate this difficult diagnosis.
"I'm so proud of our care management programs for high-risk conditions because they've able to move the needle on trend in cost and improve quality of care, and increase employee satisfaction. I think it's very infrequently that you get all that going on at once," she says.
Team player
Werle is known as a strong mentor and coach. As one employee on her team said put it: "The global benefits staff is blessed with [her] steadfast support and leadership," adding that Werle makes "being part of this team a joy," and always keeps "our interest and well being first and foremost."
It's a sentiment that is echoed from many more of Werle's colleagues and partners.
Dawn has this incredible ability to think outside of the box and constantly create opportunities for Time Warner, their employees and for her partners, like Fidelity," says Lori Shapiro, Fidelity's senior VP for strategic market workplace investing.
"Dawn really understands an organization's strengths and looks to maximize those strengths. She came to us in early 2008 with an idea that would draw in several aspects of Fidelity's offering across our organization that would provide benefits to the Time Warner workforce. This was so exciting for Fidelity and Time Warner, as it allowed us to collaborate across Fidelity businesses and create a new approach to help improve retirement readiness within Time Warner. None of this would have been developed had it not been for Dawn's diligence and perspective."
Says Michael Capeles, a UnitedHealthcare national accounts strategic client executive, who worked with Werle on Time Warner's care management programs for maternity, autism and cancer: "It is not very often that one has the opportunity to work with such a passionate and dynamic leader. In a very short period of time, Dawn has become a driving force in our efforts to transform our clinical organization into one that is capable of adapting and innovating to the specifications of our partner clients.
"With Dawn's driving passion for innovation and programs that deliver long term savings there is no place Time Warner can't go."
However, for all these accolades from her benefits teammates, Werle says she's happiest playing for the home team - as a mother to her children Courtney and Kyle and wife to her husband Tom, a consultant whom she met while building her first integrated disability model.
"He has a subscription to EBN, and every now and then he'll share something he read," she says. "But for us, the focus is on our family. I'm a wife and mother and happy to be that."
