In our last blog post, we covered the high-level industry trends shared in our webinar, “Maximizing Employee Benefits Utilization: Strategies for Success.” Now that you have a sense of what types of benefits resonate best with employees in the current landscape, how can you ensure that your people make the most of what you offer them?  

Here are our top 3 tips for communicating the value of your benefits within your workforce.

Tip # 1: Always be emailing

• Make sure your HR team—and even your benefits partners—have direct access to employee email addresses.
• Consider asking employees to share the email addresses of their spouses, partners, or other decision-makers at home, so you can communicate about benefits with them directly.
• The more consistently you can communicate the availability, value, and use cases for the benefits you offer, the better, so those benefits will be top-of-mind for your people and their families when relevant life situations arise.

Example: Year-round benefits emails and programming at Goodheart-Willcox

Knowing that medical benefits will take exclusive priority in employees’ minds during their yearly open enrollment period, Goodheart-Willcox sends two forms of email communications to their team throughout the year to keep reminding them of other helpful benefits available to them.

Along with weekly companywide newsletters, they send standalone emails delving into challenges their benefits can address—like managing stress—and invitations to webinars hosted by their benefits vendors where employees can engage with them directly.

Tip #2: Meet members where they are

• Don’t limit communications to just email; use the various types of media that will best reach all employees (and even their families) in their day-to-day routines.
• When an employee experiences a life situation that requires support, they’re likely to inform their manager before contacting anyone on your people team. Make sure managers are up to speed on all the ways employees can use their benefits, so they can recommend specific benefits in response to relevant personal challenges.
• Leverage the power of (IRL or virtual) “watercooler chat.” If an employee has a great experience using one of their benefits to solve a personal challenge, they’re likely to recommend it to friends and colleagues. Reaching out to employees for testimonials that you’ll include in digital communications can help you share recommendations at scale.
• Lean on your benefits vendors and partners for content, communications, and even Q&A sessions that you can share with employees to remind them of the value of their benefits.

Example: Multimedia communications for the whole family at Hylant

Hylant includes spouses on all email communications about benefits and regularly mails benefits information to their homes, so their whole family can be aware of the benefits available to them. When rolling out new benefits, they leverage help from their vendors to assemble robust, multimedia communications campaigns that they support with reminders throughout the year to keep growing utilization.

Tip #3: Understand your employees as more than numbers

• Driving home the full value of a specific benefit to your employees requires understanding them as people.
• To uncover the benefit use cases that will be most helpful to the people in your workforce, start by digging deeper into data points that will tell you more about what matters to them than just their age, gender and job title.
• Here are some examples of additional questions you can explore when segmenting employees (in addition to their age, gender, and job title) to understand their specific needs, from benefit options to communications:
  • What’s their level of seniority (entry, mid-, senior, etc.)?
  • Are they part of a union?
  • Are they salaried or hourly?
  • Do they work shifts or standard business hours?
  • Are they located in a rural or metropolitan area?
  • Do they have dependents at home who would appreciate direct communication about the benefits available to them?

Example: Onsite benefits meetings with manufacturing employees for a Cariloop client

After one of our clients launched Cariloop caregiver benefits to their employees via email, they discovered that a significant number of caregivers had yet to start using their benefits. Because these employees worked on manufacturing teams and spent their shifts on production lines, they had limited access to email while working and hadn’t learned about their new benefits as a result. So, their Cariloop team sent representatives to their manufacturing facility to meet with employees during designated break times to have conversations with them about how to make the most of their caregiving benefits.

While helpful, these strategies might sound like a heavy lift to implement—particularly if you’re part of a small team. We’re here to remind you of the support systems that can be ready to help. Lean on the dedicated teams of your benefits partners, like Cariloop, to help you communicate the best expression of what we offer to your employees, and even dig into the data with you to understand how your communications can best reach them.

Learn how to effectively measure what’s working about your benefits in our next blog post, and catch the full webinar recording here.