An ideal compensation plan always takes a comprehensive employee wellness approach. Knowing how to educate employees on benefits such as sick days, health insurance, retirement benefits, maternity/paternity leaves, etc., is important in retaining employees and attracting and maintaining top-tier talent.
Although workers highly value these perks, a significant information gap appears between the presence of such perks and the employees' awareness of them.
How to educate employees on benefits? Do you have a plan for communicating and educating employees about their benefits? Your HR team needs to assess the answers to these queries.
According to a recent Aflac poll, 65% of businesses place a high importance of employee benefits, and 83% of employers believe that communication, employee education, and engagement are essential to total benefits delivery.
Fewer than 25% of businesses use technology for non-payroll HR tasks like how to educate employees on benefits?
What are Employee Benefits?
Employee benefits are the non-wage compensation offered to attract the best talent in addition to their regular pay or wages.
These benefits could include group insurance (health, dental, and life, for example), retirement benefits, student loans, other loans (home loans, car loans, etc.), sick days, and flexible alternative arrangements.
An organization's most precious asset is its employees, so it is crucial to comprehend their needs and support their engagement and satisfaction. When provided to employees, employee perks are a factor in improved performance and support for your staff.
Why Employee Benefits Matter?
According to a Randstad survey, a concrete benefits package is the most crucial criterion when evaluating job offers by 66% of workers.
Working for a company that prioritizes the welfare of its employees is undoubtedly very reassuring, which in turn increases the employees' motivation level significantly and enables them to form a favorable impression of the firm's culture and principles.
Here are a few tried-and-true methods your business can try on how to educate employees on benefits and actively interact with them to gain deeper insights about the subject.
1. Attract the Best of the Best
The caliber of a company's workforce determines its success or failure. The best workers will never stick around if they don't feel valued.
In today's very competitive business environment, offering a clear and attractive benefits package is one of the most effective methods to recruit and retain top personnel.
2. More Productivity
Productivity increases when teams are talented and well-resourced. Well-cared-for teams will return the favor by performing their tasks more effectively instead of simply turning up and accomplishing the bare minimum.
There is no doubt that better benefits programs encourage employees to work harder.
3. Better Reputation-building
Your business must prioritize both online and offline PR. Clients in the modern era have indicated that they are more likely to interact with a company that they feel has similar values.
A public relations crisis can cost a corporation its business if its employees are treated poorly. It only takes one angry worker to disrupt business as usual and drive away customers.
8 Powerful Techniques to Educate Employees
1. Digitize it
We recommend reconsidering your commitment to producing the benefits booklet. It wastes paper and costs money from your HR budget as well. Employees, like you, don't want to read through a paper packet.
Due to the rapid advancement of technology, there has been a discernible shift away from conventional forms of communication and toward the limitless possibilities that the digital sphere provides.
The most effective method of how to educate employees on benefits by sharing vital information, such as specifics of business perks, is by turning out into a digital platform that acts as a central hub for maintaining employee records and is easily accessible and user-friendly.
Instead of taking the time-consuming inconvenience of first contacting HR, asking for the necessary paperwork, and then having enough time to browse through it once it's in their possession flippantly, employees may easily get this information with a few clicks.
2. Put the most important information first
The most noteworthy material should always be presented first in a piece, followed by supporting facts and background information. This is common sense for any writer worth their salt. This is frequently referred to as "The Inverted Pyramid."
In the same way, format your benefits guide. When selecting how to structure the guide as a whole and arrange material on a single page, start with the most urgent, pertinent information and work your way down.
(For instance, major benefits like health, dental, and vision insurance should be prioritized over short-term disability benefits, which should be prioritized over optional benefits, and so forth.)
3. Be Omnipresent
New ideas and established norms need not be at odds with one another when you consider how to educate employees on benefits. Your workforce's demographic makeup is probably broad and diversified.
The youthful blood in your organization would have a predilection for the fascinating world of social media. However, the senior section is probably still tenaciously clinging to relatively traditional ways of communication like face-to-face meetings, paper-based manuals, or text messages.
Then other techniques are popular among all age groups, like email. To ensure your message is as widely distributed as possible, it is crucial to maintain your presence across several platforms.
Start thinking creatively and never stop coming up with new and creative employee benefits ideas. Or perhaps ask your upper management to initiate a conversation regarding benefit packages with their respective teams through interactive presentations and educational workshops!
4. Emphasize Authentic Employee Experiences
We'd like to use this opportunity to gently intervene if your benefits guide is filled with stock photographs of generic business people living their best generic life. Why?
Your benefits handbook is a great place to demonstrate the value of your benefits package to current and prospective employees. Including staff and event photos would be a good idea.
Include brief anecdotes to highlight the importance of employee benefits throughout the guide highlighting how your benefits program has impacted the lives of individual employees.
When people can relate to the information presented during benefits enrollment, they are much more likely to participate. And if they recognize themselves and others in your guide, and if they learn from real-life examples of how to maximize their benefits? They will pay far closer attention to that than they would to a generic picture.
5. Get Social
Despite widespread opinion, there is more to social media than sharing cat videos. It will take employees an hour to learn about benefits. How much time does the typical user spend on social media? More than 90 minutes daily. Such creative employee benefits ideas yield higher engagement rates.
Employees are a fantastic target demographic because you can reach them where they already spend time online (social media). You might open the lines of communication by creating a closed Facebook group for HR-related discussions and using a closed chat channel like Slack.
6. Display The Numbers And The Costs/Benefits
Ensure that each employee's costs are transparent. Give a full breakdown of all expenses an employee can face when selecting a particular plan or healthcare option.
It involves more than just the plan design's math. Employees must be aware of how a plan may impact their cash flow, for instance, if they require emergency hospitalization or an unanticipated x-ray or MRI. They need to be aware of the in-network providers and the repercussions of seeing a physician outside the network.
They must comprehend how their health savings account can enable them to put money aside for the present and the future. Given their particular health and financial situation, assist them in determining how each plan will affect them directly.
7. Everyone Loves Incentives
Another technique to keep their attention is incorporating attractive incentives into your campaign to inform the employees about company benefits.
In the middle of the mundane boredom of an office job, even the slight allure of delectable treats, free lunches, and gift cards is enough to encourage them to pay attention to what you have to say. Never undervalue the value of freebies!
8. Make Your Plans Flexible To Accommodate Different Needs
According to MetLife, 40% of workers said having access to a broad range of benefits would increase their sense of loyalty to their employer.
Offer a wide range of benefits options, including top-tier medical, dental, and vision coverage. Allow workers to personalize programs with reasonable options to suit their specific needs.
Many firms hire employee benefits consultants to keep providing excellent benefits packages that help retain their best employees and attract new, highly qualified candidates.
The current environment mandates larger rate hikes, altered contribution laws, and endless legislative red tape pages, with severe penalties lurking should an employer not be in complete compliance.
Final Thoughts
Maintaining the information flowing throughout the year is crucial, even though you may implement one or more of the above suggestions.
A fun approach how to educate employees on benefits is asking your team a monthly trivia question on the benefits and wellness programs you provide and rewarding the respondent with a prize. Your employees will stay educated and engaged if you highlight various aspects of your wellness or benefits programs each month.
To create a healthy, productive workplace, remember that providing comprehensive benefits and wellness programs and educating your team on how to use them are crucial first steps. However, it's crucial to let your staff know that you value their health and well-being as much as they do.
Designing and implementing customized software may take a little longer, but the long-term advantages significantly outweigh this. If you need a customized HR solution, Oreed is developed by skilled developers, and you will be thoroughly taken care of at every stage, from initial design to execution.
Whether it involves onsite, hybrid, remote, or micro-learning, educational content about employee benefits can be delivered much more engaging, thanks to Oreed's interactive capabilities.
