When it comes to communicating benefits to employees, there’s a lot at stake when companies make mistakes.
As an employer, ineffective benefits communications mean you miss out on the opportunity to increase employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Meanwhile, employees miss opportunities that would positively impact their wellbeing and finances.
The bottom line is: If your communication efforts aren’t effective, it’s a lose-lose situation for both you and your employees.
The importance of measuring communication efforts
If you’re not measuring your efforts to communicate employee benefits, you’ll never know if your communications program is effective or your employee benefit has reached its full potential within your employee population. The only way to know if your communications are effective is by analyzing your efforts.
If you don’t feel comfortable measuring your benefits communications, you’re not alone. HR.com found that in 77% of organizations, HR professionals say they measure employee communication to only a moderate, low, or very low degree.
How to measure benefits communications
There are multiple layers to measuring the effectiveness of benefits communications. Your measurements can be split up into 4 categories:
– Media analytics
– Employee perception
– Employee understanding
– Return on Investment (ROI) of benefits
1. Media Analytics
Certain media will be more popular than others. For example, it’s likely that certain articles or videos will be viewed more often. Knowing which resources are being viewed and at what frequency can help you maximize your communications.
When you discover one of your resources is popular among employees, ask yourself and your HR team: “Does this data align with our goals and expectations?” If you discover some media is unpopular when it shouldn’t be, you may need to promote it again. Don’t be afraid to promote specific benefits or media multiple times.
Your team can also measure more advanced analytics of the effectiveness of specific resources and media. You can look at:
– Comparisons to peers
– Comparisons to prior years
– Video drop off data
– Time on page
Here’s an example of the video analytics our platform natively collects that helps our clients fine-tune their video communications:
2. Employee perception
Analytics are critical, but don’t forget that benefits are offered to improve the lives of employees to make them healthy, productive, enabled members of the organization. It makes sense to consider their perceptions when you analyze the effectiveness of your benefits communications.
Analyzing the perception of your employees doesn’t have to be challenging. This can be done in the form of pulse surveys sent periodically. While surveys aren’t the right tool for quizzing employees, they are great to help the HR team understand how satisfied employees are with benefits communications.
Employee feedback will help you improve your communications plan and overtime, your benefit offerings.
3. Employee understanding
For your benefits communications to be effective, employees must be able to understand them. That’s why measuring employee understanding can give you great insight into whether or not your communications are doing their job.
Use quizzes and assessments to measure whether or not employees understand your communications. These quizzes can also be used as an incentive to fund individual benefits! Offering rewards for completing these assessments is a great way to make sure your employees complete them.
4. Return on Investment (ROI) of benefits
You implemented a benefit for a reason. What is the goal you wish to achieve for that specific benefit? Use promotions and communications to achieve your desired results. Then, measure your targeted results. For example, you may be looking for increased program adoption, login attempts, or new sign-ups.
Measuring your Return on Investment (ROI) of benefits also includes looking at cost savings.
After measuring effectiveness, implement changes
You’ve now learned how to measure the effectiveness of your benefits communications. However, only 29% of HR professionals say their organization is good or very good at making positive changes based on HR analytics.
Create ways to measure
We understand that analytics can be difficult to obtain, especially if you never have before. That’s where LearnYour Benefits comes in. Our platform allows for complete customization and real-time data to gauge adoption and interest.
And not only can we help you measure the effectiveness of your communications, but we can also help you use the data to improve your communications plan!
LearnYour Benefits helps you drive results and promote your benefits. It’s a catalyst to help you reach your goals and create an ROI on your benefits. Schedule a demo today to learn more!
