How to give employees better benefits choices without confusing them

Dive Brief:

As important as the benefits offerings you use to drive retention and attract talent are, you must also be sure to communicate those benefits to employees, according to an article at HRMorning.com.
But this is an area in which it’s easy to fall short. To help ensure that doesn’t happen, wellness and health management software maker Keas offered up some of the biggest mistakes it sees employers making — as well as tips on how to avoid them.
Over the past decade, HR departments have been diversifying their benefits vendors in an effort to mitigate rising costs and give their employees the choice and flexibility they crave. This diversification definitely provides value, but it also leads to significant communication challenges.

Dive Insight:

Author Adena DeMonte, senior director of marketing at Keas, lays out several suggestions for effective benefits communications and planning. For example, HR teams frequently send out a deluge of benefits information once a year, right around the time of open enrollment. The overwhelming amount of information can seem daunting to employees who put it in a drawer, or worse, in the trash, instead of perusing it carefully.

A more effective approach is to break that information down into more digestible chunks and dole them out regularly over the course of the year. Whether studying for a mid-term exam or reading up on healthcare plan options, people absorb and retain information better this way. The human brain can only take in so much at a time.

Another idea is that more diversified benefits choices increases the likelihood that employees will be able to find offerings that meet their unique needs. Of course, she writes, greater choice also puts a greater burden of responsibility on the employee to sort through it all and figure out which programs are right for them. Manually creating individual employee health profiles and matching them to relevant programs is a laborious, time-intensive process, but there are now health management platforms that can do this automatically.