Three ways to communicate the value of your benefits package – and why
Your benefits package is fundamental to the workplace experience you offer – you know this, but do you know how your employees feel about their benefits? While the value of your benefits is a key component of your overall value proposition, communicating it regularly and in a way that makes sense to your people, both in and outside of work, is a key driver of recruitment and retention.
Clarifying the value of your benefits package brings numerous benefits in this sense, but most of all it conveys to employees how much they are valued. It not only highlights what they get when they work for you, it also demonstrates who you are as a company – which is vital in a world where people want to work for businesses that have purpose beyond profit.
Pay attention to the details
While benefits design and implementation can undoubtedly improve workplace satisfaction, it can have the opposite effect if employees feel overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of information. If they don’t know how to find the information they need or they don’t even know where to begin looking, they’re less likely to engage. And if your benefits participation is low, the ripple effect can be far-reaching – not only on employee satisfaction, but also talent attrition.
Clarity of messaging is therefore a vital component of your benefits communication strategy. Take the work out of finding, understanding and knowing how to maximize the value of what you offer. For example, build campaigns around the lesser known features to round out the full scope of your package beyond the big players like medical plans and HSAs.
Also note that attention to detail means collating and understanding communications preferences and spreading messaging across multiple tactics and touchpoints – be that in-person or online – to ensure that all employees get the information they need.
What’s more, you can add value by guiding employees to one place – a single source of truth that’s easy to access. When we partnered with Ohio Health to deliver this approach, it led to a notable increase in engagement with the benefits platform.
Don’t be afraid to open the door to employee feedback – give them the opportunity to inform and enhance benefits communications. If you enable innovation that’s inclusive, you further support alignment between employee and employer.
Communicate value by aligning values
People want and need to feel that they belong – that they have purpose. They want to work for an employer whose values align with their own personal values. Communicating the value your benefits bring is therefore an effective way to demonstrate this alignment. It goes hand in hand with communicating how much each employee is valued.
It’s one thing to focus on maximizing the quantity of benefits to increase employee choice, it’s another to think about quality and impact. Employees don’t just want to know what’s in it for them when they work for you, they also want to know where they fit into the bigger picture of your organization’s vision and mission – and if the values underpinning these align with their own.
Communicating this means understanding your workforce demographic, what they need and what’s important to them. Then finding ways to convey how your benefits can meet these needs and uphold these values. Offering a competitive benefits package is essential to the employee experience, but demonstrating how this supports flexibility, diversity and wellbeing is even more so.
Make sure you tailor benefits communications in ways that engender affinity and trust – that create a culture of belonging where employees feel seen, valued and energized. Let them know they’re heard too. When we worked with Schneider Electric to communicate benefits enhancements that addressed specific concerns raised by employees, it resulted in vastly increased engagement.
Let employees help you communicate value in a meaningful way – moreover, let them guide you in responding to their changing needs within a changing world.
Allow the way you communicate value to evolve
As the world around us changes, so do the needs of the people in it, which means you need to keep your communications strategy organic. Keep evolving it in line with evolving employee needs – keep working at it in the same way you work on any relationship. By understanding and responding to these changes, you bring your people along with you instead of getting out ahead of them.
This may require something as simple as highlighting the value of one benefit over another or a complete rethink of your overall benefits positioning. Take today’s pressing economic issues, for example, which call for a need to highlight financial savings. Consider drawing out the ways that certain benefits cost less or help make money go further. Knowing and responding to the biggest issues your workforce is facing enables you to clearly demonstrate how your benefits offer support with those issues – and therein lies the value.
Our partnership with Illinois Tool Works illustrates this well. While the company’s 401(k) plan saw participation hovering around 95%, many employees did not show signs of taking ownership of plan savings. We transformed engagement levels with an award-winning postcard series featuring games to educate and drive visits to plan resources.
While we’ve highlighted just three ways to communicate the value of your benefits offering, there are more – let us partner with you in finding those that are aligned to your business and your workforce. Investment in benefits communication is an investment in your people, in your business – and your shared future. We can work with you to make that future a success.
Our team of internal communication consultants is well-versed in supporting organizations in communicating the true value of benefits in a changed and changing world. Get in touch.