5 Steps for Year-Round Benefits Engagement
Open enrollment is something you probably only think about a few times a year. For employees, it might be even less often. That is unfortunate because that means employees may not be maximizing their benefits. That’s why it’s important to touch on benefits throughout the year, ensuring employees are making the most of them.
Here are five steps for providing employees with thoughtful, year-round benefits engagement:
- Have a Goal in Mind
It’s ineffective 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 make you hit the right marks.
2. Keep Topics Relevant
As you communicate throughout the year, don’t lose sight of your goal. You 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. Get to the Point
All your messaging should get straight to the point. People can get tired of seeing the same information over and over. If your communications go on and on, employees will become disinterested faster. The basic message formula should be:
- The pitch: “Here’s something you may not know about your benefits.”
- The why: “Here is why it’s important to you.”
- Call to action: “This is what you should do to learn more about the information.”
If a communication has multiple versions of these elements, that may be a sign it’s too lengthy.
4. Switch Up the Medium
Not everyone retains information in the same way. Vary your communication methods instead of sticking to one medium. It could mean mailing print flyers, sending mass emails, posting videos on a website, and displaying posters. The idea is to get your message out through every channel available!
5. Set up a Communication Calendar
Having communications that are goal-oriented, relevant, effective, and multi-channeled is awesome, but you must also know when to send them. Consider setting up a communication calendar to help. Consider important dates and schedule messaging for those times. At the very least, having a calendar will help you space out communications to reduce messaging fatigue.
