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 It’s that wonderful time of year for U.S. businesses and employees. Soon, we’ll all be asked to choose our 2010 benefits options through the American tradition of “open enrollment.”
But this year, it’s likely employees will be studying their options with heightened interest. Given the headline-generating national debate over health care, it’s only natural that open enrollment will be more meaningful than ever.
But will your people fully understand what they’re looking at?
Think about your own experience with your benefits enrollment. Do you have the time to uncover every rock or weigh every option available to you? Do you understand all the nuances and tradeoffs of different plans? Can you easily select the most appropriate coverage for you and your family? Or do you simply and quickly renew whatever it was you had the previous year, hoping it’s still the best plan for you?
Maybe you just ask your coworkers what they’ve selected and then mirror their elections. Considering that on average employees spend 30 minutes making benefits-related decisions, it’s pretty clear it’s an expedited task!
The question I can’t help but ask is, “Why?” Why do we spend so little time making a decision as important (and potentially costly) as selecting our benefits? If you ask me, all you have to do is look at how confusing and unclear – even overwhelming – traditional benefits communications can be and you’ll have the answer. Information about policies arrives in your Inbox or at home and, try though one might, it’s hard to make heads or tails of what it all means.
With open enrollment upon us, it’s time to think about how best to communicate about your programs, so employees understand the decisions that were made in changing or enhancing benefits.
Through the years, our Insidedge team has worked with many clients and alongside some of the strongest benefits organizations to communicate the specifics of a company’s offering. In keeping with our employee communications philosophy, we see our role as “translators.” We seek to convey complex terms and issues in simple, understandable language.
Through our work, however, we’ve realized that even the best intentions (and benefits offerings) are often foiled by a handful of common pitfalls. Based on our experience, we can offer 10 tips to help strengthen communications as you’re planning for open enrollment:
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Increase the candor. Hopefully by now everyone knows that healthcare costs are a significant financial burden for employees and companies alike. Your people are intelligent, so don’t sugarcoat this reality or try to over-rationalize changes to programs. Decisions have consequences and if your company or your industry is struggling and you’ve had to make some different decisions, communicate honestly about the “what” and the “why.” If you’re driving people toward particular prescription plans, let them know and let them know why. In fact, a recent survey by Watson Wyatt claims employers do not do a good job linking organizational performance with the pay and benefits offered to employees. It’s time to start! |
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Don’t bury the lead. If you put yourself in the shoes of your employees, you realize they have one predominant question whenever open enrollment comes around: “What’s changed since last year?” So help them out. Summarize any key changes immediately in any benefits-related communications, providing a concise summary of the changes and then elaborating in more detail elsewhere in the communications. These highlights help employees – especially longer-term employees – focus on what’s new and different about this year’s options. |
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Broaden the dialogue. Too often we get caught up in discussing “premiums” and “tiers” and other fundamentals of healthcare insurance, but overlook the impact of the overall benefits package and its value to employees. Take time to talk about more than just health insurance. Quality of life and related issues are increasing in importance for employees, and even more so for the younger generations in our workforce. Give your non-traditional benefits decent air time – talk about flexible work schedules, discounted gym memberships or new adoption benefits. Talk about what you offer that’s in addition to those core programs that are beneficial for employees. While a reduced-fee legal service may certainly benefit some employees, I bet countless more would love to know about how you support their volunteering in their communities. You have their attention during open enrollment. Take advantage. |
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It’s not just seasonal. Open enrollment should not be the only time you talk about benefits. That once-a-year mentality just reinforces the transactional nature of benefits. Instead, include information about offerings or profiles of people benefitting from your programs throughout the year to reinforce its importance on the total employee experience. This common-sense approach gives you an ongoing opportunity to promote and enhance the employer-employee bond too many companies otherwise take for granted. |
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Simplify the language. Even as someone who frequently works on communicating employee benefits, I’m surprised at how often I read something benefits-related that makes little or no sense to me. Your communication may be technically accurate. But if you don’t humanize the language, it can all start to sound like corporate doublespeak after a while. When benefits communication sounds as if it’s been written by HR people for HR people, that third-shift worker in your plant is going to get lost in the jargon. Remember, you’re not writing your thesis in English Lit here. So use simple, easy to understand language. Think like your employees and make it easy for them to project themselves into what they’re reading or hearing. |
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Create profiles. Nothing can help people relate to a complex topic more effectively than profiles that represent actual or composites of fictional employees. As someone who is not married and has no children, my needs for benefits are very different than someone with a large family or someone who is caring for their elderly parent. Use the life stages of a typical employee as a way to illustrate the totality of your program. Explain how the choices a married mother of four makes are naturally different than those of the recent college grad. |
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Reach the decision makers. There’s nothing that says old school employee communications more than a mailing directly to the home of an employee. That said, this is one of the best ways to communicate about benefits. By breaking the barrier into the home, you are getting your information into the family setting and, potentially, into the hands of others participating in (or even leading) the decision-making process. |
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Differentiate your offerings – if you can. We’ve worked with many companies that sought to differentiate their benefits offerings in order to achieve some form of external recognition by a media outlet or to enhance their efforts in recruiting key talent. Not so surprisingly, many of these companies that think they’re so unique really aren’t once you look at their programs. In the same vein as broadening the dialogue, look at your program and be prepared to say what is unique about it. And, if there’s nothing too unique, don’t over-sell it. |
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Keep the team visible. In our organization, the HR team is great and has such a wealth of beneficial knowledge that I invade their space on a pretty regular basis. What should be learned from this is that HR teams need to be visible to employees. Having access to people with better or more detailed information is beneficial to everyone. Create forums to have your HR folks chat about the programs, explain the changes or highlight new and non-traditional offerings. For those of you with self-service models that rely on call centers or website enrollment, consider bringing back the classic Benefits Fairs so employees can have their questions answered in-person by true subject matter experts. We’ve found these types of activities to be very effective in some environments (manufacturing and remote locations to name a few). These types of activities boost the credibility of the HR team and that of the organization. And, ultimately it will help ensure your employees make informed decisions and get the most out of their benefits. After all, isn’t that the goal? |
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Keep the team knowledgeable. If part of your strategy is to rely on remote or decentralized HR representatives to help carry the message to employees, be sure to spend the time upfront to educate them about the program. Using the same model that would apply when briefing managers or supervisors on organizational change, bring the audience together on a conference call or web meeting to discuss the new program, summarize the changes, familiarize them with the planned communications and timeline as well as to answer any questions they may have. This type of preparation dramatically boosts their comfort level with the activities and allows them to be stronger resources for their employees. |
No doubt from the company’s perspective, a benefits program boils down to two key issues: controlling costs and retaining employees. But when you consider that research has shown that employees that are satisfied with their benefits are more satisfied with their jobs and their employer, don’t you think it’s important to get the communications right? By improving your benefits-related communication, you can make certain that your company’s open enrollment is even more successful – and meaningful – than in years past.
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