Laurence Cacho Brings Thirty-Five Years of Experience to GEHA Health

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Taking a look at Laurence Cacho’s resume, a hiring officer might think, “This guy has worked too many places.”

What most human resource professionals might view as a detriment, Cacho insists is an advantage. “What having worked at many different companies has afforded me to do is to see most things in my area of expertise, in many different ways,” says Cacho, vice president of total rewards and Workday at Government Employees Health Association (GEHA).

Cacho’s role on the total rewards (defined as Compensation and Employee Benefits) side of the ledger is to drive strategy, mission, vision, and execution of all employee programs, like delivering training seminars at which leaders learn how to assign merit and bonuses to employees. “I come up with the administering or the leading pay initiatives at GEHA,” says Cacho. On the Workday side, his team administers the human capital and financial management system, maintaining employee and financial records for the entire organization.  

Since coming to GEHA in March of 2023, Cacho has implemented significant changes to the organization’s health, benefits, and welfare, revamping GEHA’s medical offerings to provide a differentiation in products. “Before we had two PPOs and a high-deductible health plan, all of which provided similar benefits but no real choice to employees which discounted consumerism from the selection process. We switched up the products,” says Cacho.

Americans, Cacho says, are just one health incident away from being destitute, making the selection of health insurance not just a lifestyle decision but a financial one as well. To ensure GEHA employees bring the most up-to-date information possible into open enrollment, Cacho drove a strategy to educate employees so that they could be better consumers and select products that best fit their personal situation. “This is something that is near and dear to them, they just don’t know it. It has a financial impact,” he says.

“The goal is to drive employees to take action where their own health situation is concerned.”

Laurence Cacho

To reduce unnecessary health incidents and prevent disease, this year Cacho is overhauling GEHA’s health and wellbeing program. “The goal is to drive employees to take action where their own health situation is concerned,” says Cacho. GEHA currently offers all employees a yearly biometric screening program. They have their blood drawn and in return received a small subsidy. The problem, according to Cacho, is that GEHA was not offering enough cash to incentivize its employees to participate in the program, and those who did participate did nothing with the results.

To incentivize GEHA workers to participate in the program, Cacho plans to increase the subsidy and in exchange will require employees to take action to improve their health status should their biometric or health screening uncover issues that should be addressed in an of a number of areas, such as diabetes, colorectal screenings, and mammograms. “If your blood sugar is high, you’re going to have to get into a diabetes prevention program. If you’re pregnant you’re going to have to get into a pregnancy management program sooner. So, we’re driving employees to take action by offering cash, essentially,” says Cacho.

Cacho is also making changes to Workday. To streamline the process and allow GEHA to better account for the number of positions on the books, he’s automating position management. “Right now, it’s in an Excel spreadsheet, but we’re going to leverage the tool that we paid a lot of money for in Workday to drive the process,” says Cacho.

One of the more interesting jobs Cacho has had in his thirty-five-year career was with the CIA. He was originally hired by the agency to guide it through a modification of its pay structure, but when that project was cancelled, he was assigned to “some of the most impactful work” he’s ever done leveraging his knowledge compensation of and benefits to ensure that CIA’s mission objectives continued to be achieved.

The project that he worked on and processes that he helped design earned him a reputation, allowing him to attend operational school and work overseas. “I did that for the next eight years. I lived all over the world, mostly hotspots, which is why I wound up leaving the agency,” says Cacho. That time spent in operations improved me as a HR Professional because it allowed me to be a consumer of HR “stuff” and better understand my customer when I returned to being a HR practitioner.

“Those experiences that I’ve had I bring with me to the engagement. I’m willing to share different ways of looking at things, and I’m willing to share different ways of doing things with my employees. They are gaining the experience from my fifteen different companies.”

Laurence Cacho

Cacho, who has two direct reports and eight total who fall under him, leads with empathy, knowing he’s performed all the jobs his reports are currently performing over his thirty-five years. “Those experiences that I’ve had I bring with me to the engagement. I’m willing to share different ways of looking at problems, and I’m willing to share different ways of doing things with my employees. They are gaining the experience from my many employment engagements,” Cacho says with a chuckle.

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