Five Steps to Year-Round Engagement

You probably only think about open enrollment a few times a year. And employees think about it even less, meaning they may not be engaged in maximizing their benefits. It’s important to educate on benefits throughout the year—to ensure employees are not only making the most of their benefits but understand the value of them.

You should be providing employees with thoughtful, year-round benefits engagement.

1. Have a Goal in Mind

It’s no good to send random communications to employees. Your benefits communications should be informed by a clear goal. For instance, your goal may be to reduce employee questions during open enrollment. From there, you could survey employees to figure out their top questions to ensure you hit the right marks.

2. Keep Topics Relevant

As you communicate throughout the year, don’t lose sight of your goal. You’ll want to make sure each message is relevant to both your main objective and to employees’ interests or benefits options. With your communications, employees will immediately want to know “what’s in it for me,” so be sure to stay on topic.

3. Aim for Brevity

All your messaging should get straight to the point. Employees can get tired of seeing the exact same information over and over. If your communications go on and on, employees will be disinterested even faster. The basic message formula should be:

1. The pitch: “Here’s something you may not know about your benefits.”
2. The why: “This is why it’s important to you.”
3. Call to action: “Here’s what you should do to learn more about this information.”

Delivering on those three components in a variety of ways will result in more views (printed or digital).

4. Change up the Medium

Not everyone retains information in the same way. So instead of sticking to one medium, be sure to vary your communication methods. This could mean mailing print flyers, sending mass emails, posting videos on an intranet site and tacking up posters. The idea is to get your message out through every channel available for a defined period of time to hit all the variables (remote, in person, at home) as well as how employees prefer to get their information.

5. Set up a Communication Calendar

Having communications that are goal-oriented, relevant, punchy and multi-channeled is great, but you don’t want your messaging to get muddled. Consider setting up a communication calendar to help. For benefits education, consider a quarterly approach to ensure content is varied and multi-touch to reach all members. At the very least, having a calendar will help you space out communications to reduce messaging fatigue.

Speak with Hylant for more benefits tips and deliverables, including tailored employee communications.