When employees understand their benefits, they utilize them better for their health, wealth, and wellbeing. Plus, when employees are happy and healthy, your business benefits from increased retention, higher productivity, and more effective recruitment.
In fact, when employees are satisfied with the frequency of benefits communications, they are 156% more likely to feel valued and appreciated.
Why is communicating benefits often important? And how frequent is enough? Keep reading to find out!
Why is frequent benefits communication important?
Employers spend significant time, money, and effort in finding and implementing great benefits for their employees. However, communication around these benefits is often one-and-done, with employees attending a benefits fair, or receiving a huge paper benefits guide.
To make sure employees are properly utilizing your benefit offerings, it’s not as simple as communicating once a year at open enrollment. Largely because that’s just not how our lives work as humans. First, we are making healthcare decisions year-round, often long after we’ve chosen a health plan. Second, our attention spans are shorter and we prefer more frequent, bite-sized reminders than singular downloads.
Benefits options are hard for employees to understand. They often struggle to understand what benefits are available to them or how to utilize them.
Just like a student learns year-round—not just before the test—employees need to have constant exposure to benefits communications. Don’t make employees drink out of a fire hose. That way, when the time to make a healthcare decision comes, your employees will know and truly understand exactly what choice to make.
Companies rarely recognize the importance of communicating about benefits year-round. If your organization takes this step, you’ll be ahead of the competition when it comes to retaining employees.
How to build a year-round communications plan
Think about it: Benefits communications is a form of product marketing. You’re communicating to market your benefit options to your employees. Therefore, a foundational way to build a year-round communications plan is to think about promoting benefits uniformly along the stages of their consumer journey:
- Stage 1: Awareness. Prior to this stage, an employee is unaware of their relevant benefits. Upon completion of this stage, the employee becomes aware that they have a benefit available to them, when they need it.
- Stage 2: Consideration. Now, let’s imagine an employee has been diagnosed with Type II Diabetes and realize they will face increased healthcare costs. At the consideration stage, the employee defines their problem and applies your benefit offerings to their needs. They’re learning how much Type II Diabetes healthcare will cost them and how complicated it is to manage. Then, they consider how to address their problem. Most importantly, if you did your awareness stage correctly, they’ll consider the benefits plans you offer and which ones will make them healthier and potentially mitigate their costs.
- Stage 3: Engagement. At this stage, your employees will thoroughly engage with the benefit you provide for them. They will engage with the emails, videos, tools, documents, websites, and products you offer. If and when they have a handle on their Type II Diabetes, they may start engaging with your benefits content to find more solutions to other problems they face. Especially if solving their main issue was simple.
- Stage 4: Nurturing. To keep your employees engaged with your benefits communications, offer value. If they need additional assistance, research, or help, at this stage—you’ll offer it to them. Provide relevant content and resources at the right time to continuously nurture your relationship with your employees.
Use the consumer journey to build a plan. However, while it’s crucial to have a plan in place, circumstances change. Flexibility is important because, over time, new challenges will present themselves. Have a plan, but don’t be afraid to make updates to it as time goes on. Your plan isn’t set in stone (and it shouldn’t be)!
The most important aspect of marketing your benefits
Most importantly, employees need to understand your communications. Sending them materials that they can’t comprehend is useless. It also means wasted time and effort from your team creating the material, just for it to not be effective.
Build frequent and intuitive messaging, and track your efforts to make sure your plan is effective. If employees aren’t engaging, then you know it’s time to change your plan.
If you need help creating a year-round plan, writing benefits communications, or tracking your efforts‚ LearnYour Benefits is here to help.
Request a demo today to learn more!
