Communicating Benefits to Your Employees

By Christina Biddle

Driving employee engagement through the education of their employer-sponsored benefit programs can have a considerable impact on effective plan and network usage and overall employee satisfaction. When a benefits program is adequately explained, employees can better understand any cost-saving resources put in place to manage claims and have an improved perception of their total compensation. 

While your organization may be used to marketing their products and services to its customer base, for HR, your customer base is the employee population. So, how can you use traditional communication techniques to ensure employees are engaged and value their benefits beyond open enrollment? Let’s review a few basics.

Know Your Audience

Pretty basic, right? It’s a no-brainer that tends to get overlooked when communicating with employees about their benefits. Effective communication requires a clear understanding of who it is you’re talking to and what’s important to them. Consider a pulse survey to find out what programs and plans are high on the list of value and to glean what methods and channels employees want to use to access information about their benefits. 

Less is More

As the saying goes, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” And as we all know, there’s not much brevity in explaining things like high deductible health plans, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket maximums. Complex, wordy benefit guides and hard-to-read medical plan summary charts are common. Information fatigue happens and can happen fast. If you have a lot of information to relay, consider breaking it into separate topics or, condense information to the most important touch-points, then provide directions to where full details can be found. Focus on the key points and make sure your messaging always answers the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Use a Multi-channel Approach

Keep in mind that people receive information as individuals, not as a group. What captivates people vary, so your approach should vary as well. Using different methods to reach individuals in a group can be as simple as folding in traditional formats, such as written materials of face-to-face meetings, with more “dynamic” resources such as explainer videos, smartphone apps, and text messaging.

Need Help Getting Started?

Find yourself with writer’s block every time you start planning communications for open enrollment? Answer these key questions and you’ll be well on your way to developing messaging that gets results. 

• Who am I trying to reach? 
• What do they need to know? 
• What’s in it for them? 
• When do they need to know it? 
• What’s the best way to deliver the message? 
• What do I want to happen as a result of the communication, or what action do they need to take? 
• How do they take that action? 
• Where do they go for help?

The Final Word

Communications should be attention-getting, thought-provoking, empathy-building, action-inducing and appropriate. And if you’re not achieving at least three of these objectives, odds are the communication will fail. Providing quality benefits is a substantial investment for your company. Marketing these benefits to your employees will help to get the most out of your investment.