online guide
Employee Benefits Communication Guide
Make the most of your benefits with effective communication.
Table of Contents
The current state of employee benefits communication
Why you should kill the benefits booklet
The basics of benefits communication
During OE: improve benefits communication
Year-round: keep benefits top-of-mind
Driving employee benefits satisfaction with benefits communication
The current state of benefits communication
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Why you should kill the employee benefits booklet
healthjoy resources
It’s Time to Kill the Benefits Booklet »
Why Baby Boomers are Flocking to Healthcare Apps »
The basics of benefits communication
Write like a fifth-grader
Keep it jargon-free
As we mentioned above, 96% of people polled in one study couldn’t define the four most common insurance terms: deductible, co-insurance, co-pay, and out-of-pocket maximum. Use the most basic terms possible in your benefits communications, knowing most employees don’t respond to jargon.
Use real-world examples
Remember that benefits exist in a vacuum, and no one needs them until they need they do. It’s crucial that you help employees understand their benefits in a way that resonates with their life. Instead of saying “you have telemed,” explain that a provider is there 24/7 to discuss their child’s medical issues.
Run benefits communications through a reading level tool
If you’re regularly writing benefits communications, you may not even be aware that you’re writing over-complicated prose. At HealthJoy, we use apps like Grammarly and Hemingway App to test the reading level, or Flesch-Kincaid score, of our writing. Run all your benefits communications through these tools, and see how far you can lower your reading level. The lower, the better.
Personalize your message
Your benefits communication should drive an emotional shift from indifferent to engaged. That means customizing your message to your audience’s life experiences. Consider segmenting your communications for different email lists, focusing on the pain points that create an emotional shift for your audience. Use tools beyond email—think Slack and text messages—to tweak your message for teams who may not be as responsive via email. HealthJoy’s artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant, JOY, can help with this customization.
Make great self-service tools available
Calculate how much those tools are costing you for every use. Even the cheapest tools are expensive when the cost per use skyrockets due to low utilization. Give your employees the tools they can use year-round, on their own, then sit back and watch your HR department save hundreds of hours a year.
Keep it short and digestible
If you don’t employees will lose interest in as little as 2 seconds. The brain sees too much information and simply disengagesIt pays to make your benefits communications scannable, containing only the essential points they need. Use short, digestible, bite-sized pieces over lengthy communications (see How to Simplify Benefits Communication for Open Enrollment).
Make it visual
healthjoy resources
How to Simplify Benefits Communication for Open Enrollment »
During OE: improve benefits education
Improve your benefits presentation
Rolling out the new year’s benefits might start with an employee benefit presentation. Unlike the benefits booklet, you can’t afford to skip this old school step. A benefits presentation is part one of your effective year-round employee benefits communication strategy, but a presentation can catapult your benefits utilization and give your employees something to remember when they need their benefits the most. Of course, the fact that you’ve always done a benefits presentation doesn’t mean you have to use the same formula from year to year. In fact, we recommend you don’t. Just a few ideas (more of which are in our “eBook: 10 Tips for Your Employee Benefits Presentation Inspired by TED Talks”): If so, you can consider a few important points:Keep slide text minimal
Short and sweet works well. Your employees will likely remember what you said more than what you wrote. Slides are just a visual aid.
Maintain look and feel of your brand
Keep employees engaged by applying your style guide to your benefits presentation.Use humor
Benefits may not be the most exciting subject in the world, but that doesn’t mean you have to avoid humor. Studies show humor helps with recall.
Smile, pause, use hands, slow down
In other words, master your body language.
Benefits communication requires emails. Make them better.
Like your employee benefits presentation, your open enrollment email campaign is likely in danger of getting stale. Most employees are bombarded with emails outside of open enrollment, and unlikely to open something unless it requires immediate action. To keep the vital information in your emails from falling off the map, revisit them from year to year. Simple tweaks like improving your subject line, cutting the length of your email, and hitting the right conversational tone can make a world of difference. Above all, make sure to proofread your emails. We’re all human, and tools like Grammarly.com make it simple to improve your writing. For more, read our eBook 6 Tips for Better Open Enrollment Emails.Leverage the latest technology for benefits communication
As you consider how to effectively communicate with employees about open enrollment, try switching things up. Consider the demographics of your employee base and build your education campaign around their needs.
If most employees are located in one office,
A lunch-and-learn style meeting might work perfectly well. The same meeting style might be difficult for your remote sales team to attend. Those employees may need a follow-up message on Slack with details from the meeting. Or, they may respond well to a live virtual Q&A through Zoom.
Perhaps you’re speaking to a mostly rural workforce.
They aren’t often at their desks and check email just once a day, so the best way to reach them may be through a combination of a couple emails and mailers sent to their home.
An SMS messaging campaign
or a push notification campaign for those with benefits centralized in an app, is likely to be effective no matter the demographics of your employee base (see What Are HealthJoy’s JOY Campaigns?).Build trust through benefits communications
Keep in mind that if you’re introducing a new benefit, you can either quickly build trust—or break it—with a few steps. Research indicates we decide almost immediately whether to trust something new. Once trust is lost, it’s extremely difficult, or even impossible, to gain back (see Building Trust in Your 2020 Benefits). To quickly establish trust in your new benefit:- Ask senior leadership to share their positive experiences with your new offering. Nothing establishes trust like real-world examples.
- Display data security protocols. Does your benefits provider have a page with this information that’s in plain English? Are there security badges to include alongside their logo? Include all of these pieces in your benefits communication from the very beginning.
- Solicit feedback. Ask your employees how they feel about their new benefit using an anonymous tool like Survey Monkey. Keep a finger on issues to remedy them before utilization tanks.
Smoothly Introduce Plan Design Changes
In 2018, there was a 20 percent increase in the number of employers offering at least one high-deductible health plan (HDHP) compared to 2016 in their plan design.
Other additions and changes are proliferating as well as companies work to add more value in a competitive job market. That puts HR in the uncomfortable position of explaining that the benefits employees have always enjoyed might be changing (see Navigating an Employee Benefits Plan Design Change).
Changing your plan design can be jarring for employees, especially because most don’t understand the basics of their insurance plan. In fact, according to the UnitedHealthcare 2017 Consumer Sentiment Survey, only 9 percent of the U.S. population showed an understanding of all four of these basic health insurance terms: plan premium, deductible, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket maximum.
Help employees by explaining in plain English what’s new with their plan. Don’t forget that employees may be starting from scratch, and that understanding benefits design takes time.
healthjoy resources
Why Tackling Benefits Awareness is Vital for Your Company »
eBook: 10 Tips for Your Employee Benefits Presentation Inspired by TED Talks »
eBook: 6 Tips for Better Open Enrollment Emails. »
What Are HealthJoy’s JOY Campaigns? »
Building Trust in Your 2020 Benefits »
Navigating an Employee Benefits Plan Design Change »
Throughout the year: keep benefits top-of-mind
Build a 365-day employee benefits education campaign
In conjunction with open enrollment, begin considering how you’ll promote your benefits and encourage engagement throughout the year. Build a cohesive communication and engagement strategy that supports your goals, addresses issues, and keeps employees happy. Using the same tools and analysis you employed during open enrollment, send employees and their families communications designed to help them use their benefits throughout the year (see Why Employees Don’t Use Your EAP Program).Plan for quarterly email updates highlighting specific benefits features. Short and sweet works well. Your employees will likely remember what you said more than what you wrote. Slides are just a visual aid.
Keep your finger on the pulse of how employees are using benefits. Solicit feedback, ask for questions, and track performance with your benefits provider.
Track your progress
There’s always room for improvement. If you aren’t tracking the success of your benefits communications, you won’t be able to iterate and improve. First, it’s crucial to test KPI’s. You might track open rates on emails or look for a spike in dependent enrollments after sending out a direct mail campaign. Or, after a broad benefits education campaign, you could track HR questions to measure the success of your initiatives (see HealthJoy Accelerates Your Cost-Containment Strategy). Once you know what is (or isn’t) working, you can adjust as much as your population allows. Changes might be as minor as changing an email header or posting in Slack, or as major as implementing a new SMS messaging system. Don’t be discouraged if your efforts don’t succeed right away—successful benefits communication is all about adjusting messaging to fit your unique employee base.healthjoy resources
Why Employees Need a Seamless Benefits Experience »
Why Employees Don’t Use Your EAP Program »
HealthJoy Accelerates Your Cost-Containment Strategy »
Driving employee benefits satisfaction with benefits communication
From outdated benefits booklets to stale presentations, benefits communications no longer work the way we expect. The result is low employee engagement, low employee benefits satisfaction, and poor healthcare decisions.
Luckily, there’s a solution. By employing the basics of good communication, you’ll establish a firm foundation. From there, analyze your OE communication plan. Consider killing your benefits booklet in favor of delivering benefits communication in a way that meets employees, and their families, where they already are.
During open enrollment, nail your presentation and emails with a few of our tips, leverage technology to get creative with campaigns, and pay attention to building employee trust right away. Don’t get nervous when introducing a plan change. Instead, help employees see the upside and offer support to navigate changes.
After OE, don’t neglect the remaining 364 days of the year. A year-round communication plan and willingness to track and tweak are essential. Build a strong benefits communication and watch as employee engagement and benefits satisfaction soar.
A Next-Level Benefits Experience
With HealthJoy’s personalized guidance and AI tech, improving your benefits experience has never been easier. See the future of benefits and schedule a demo today
