Subject: VERY URGENT, CRITICAL BENEFITS UPDATE, PLEASE OPEN DO NOT IGNORE.
From what frustrated HR professionals tell HR Brew, even an email subject line that is extreme may not yield a 100% open rate from employees. Workers are busy, and companies throw a lot of information at them during the day.
Poor communication in the benefits space can mean more than just a headache for HR—it costs employers money. In 2021, benefits software company Jellyvision surveyed employers and found that more than half of their health-care spending went to waste due to “employee confusion.”
HR Brew talked with communications professionals to understand how to craft engaging communications so HR professionals feel like they’re better able to promote employees’ understanding of and engagement with benefits offerings, and importantly, improve HR’s ROI when it comes to benefits.
Find the target. Jim Hoff, senior partner and leader of strategic communications at Aon, is one such expert who helps companies go from a Hail Mary “throw stuff up on an intranet and send out a bunch of emails” approach to a more purposeful benefits communication strategy.
Hoff’s first step is often to get specific about who HR is trying to reach and how these employees like to communicate. Sometimes, Hoff said, companies conduct employee engagement surveys to understand how their workforce likes to receive information. Other clients track the open rates of emails or which videos on their intranet have high rates of engagement.
“These things differ quite a bit by the audience you’re trying to reach, and that audience can differ by demographic factors like age and where they are in their career. It can differ by the type of role somebody’s been in. The needs of a retail or frontline employee might be very different from an engineering population, for example,” Hoff explained.
Hoff acknowledges that it is probably cost prohibitive to create benefit communications tailored to every possible employee preference. He said that companies can look for themes and create employee profiles, or personas, that capture large swathes of their workforce.
“If we looked at that data, and we’ve got, let’s say, six different kinds of personas that we’re trying to reach across your employee population, let’s spend a day mapping out the experience that those people are having now and what we want them to have. Where might they be having trouble getting resources or don’t know things exist?” Hoff suggested.
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Once HR has identified their target employee profiles, Jonathan Shooshani, the co-founder and president of Joon, a flexible wellness benefits platform, implores them to keep the messaging as fresh as possible. He’s a fan of using GIFs.
“In everything from live to pre-recorded webinars, [use] turn-key visuals that make the announcement fun. Maybe throwing some GIFs in there, [like] people on the Peloton,” Shooshani advised. “We’re also seeing that companies are doing a better job over time, communicating these benefits on their career page and using it to attract talent, rather than it being very outdated and still saying that they offer nitro coffee in the office when they haven’t been in the office in three years.”
Craft the message. Hoff advised keeping the actual language as simple as possible, noting that he has 25 years of experience in benefits comms and still finds it “something we all struggle to master.”
“[Employees are] getting bombarded with things from every direction, both at work and out of work. So to get our messages across, simplify the language,” Hoff said. “Start with just the emails you’re sending out: Make sure they’re actionable. Make sure they’ve got a short subject line, make sure they’re written in relatively plain English.”
Even the most zealous benefits team may consider that less could be more.
Heather Larson, an employee benefits practice leader at Lockton Companies, told HR Brew in a conversation about total rewards that one cause of underutilized benefits might be information overload. Larson said that rolling out too many new programs at once might make otherwise successful programs less likely to succeed.
“Just start with [adding] only one the first year and then maybe it’s a second a second year, maybe even take a year off because employees will get information overload,” Larson said. “If people don’t know what's out there, they’re not using it…So you do need to give programs time to be successful. But also you just don’t want to throw too much at people. They can’t process that much information.”—SV
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