Three top tips to ensure your people understand, access and utilise their wellbeing benefits
From an exciting benefits brand to interactive, clever technology solutions, there are a number of ways you can increase your benefits engagement. We explore three top tips to help you ensure your people understand, access and utilise their wellbeing benefits.
1. Promote
Promote at every opportunity – you need to think about how wellbeing support fits in with every interaction you have with employees. There are many different communication methods you can use and different methods will appeal to different members of your workforce. The important thing is to tailor your communication to your people and promote the benefits that are important to them.
Having a good benefits brand is really key here as your communication needs to capture your colleagues’ attention in order for your people to engage with their wellbeing benefits. Long, text-heavy communications are unlikely to increase engagement rates. Your people are living-fast paced lives. They want to know what is being offered to them and why, so it’s important to make your communications informative but straight to the point and highly enticing.
Whatever you use to communicate, you need to think about how your promotion works within that and who you are targeting with the different communication types. As a business, another good consideration is using case studies to illustrate the impact your benefits can have on an employee’s lifestyle. Real stories and reviews are a great way to drive engagement with other members of your team as they can see the positive effects this has had on their colleagues.
2. Technology
When it comes to increasing understanding and engagement between your people and their wellbeing benefits, technology is the enabler. Your benefits offering needs to be accessible from home and at your people’s fingertips. It needs to be interactive and enticing in order to increase engagement rates.
To ensure good engagement, use a variety of media to promote awareness of the wellbeing benefits you offer. Different people will find certain communications more useful, engaging and easy to use than others. It’s really important to ensure you communicate effectively with your people, that you use different methods, but all are likely to rely on efficient technology.
One of the best ways to use technology to your advantage is a Benefits Platform. You already hold lots of data on your people from HR systems and benefits data. A platform uses this information to tailor your communication. A good benefits platform is easy for your people to access and use, and makes it easier for you to monitor engagement and take up of your benefits offering.
A platform can even prompt your people to explore benefits that might be useful for them when they need it most. For example, it can send a notification about adding a child to their Private Medical Insurance when they start a family as this is data you already have – a benefits platform simply utilises it to help both you and your people.
3. Relate
Make it relatable – your people often don’t realise the value they can get from the wellbeing benefits you offer. An EAP, for example, can help those who are struggling with a legal dispute; financial education can help your people understand how to lock in the best mortgage rates. There’s a common assumption that these benefits are only to be used by those experiencing poor mental, physical or financial health, so it’s important to educate your people on the wide variety of issues these benefits can support them with.
Data you already have can also help you generate personalised notifications. For example, if somebody moves house, you already have this data in your HR system, so now would be a great time to promote savings they may be able to make on home insurance or other home-related benefits.
The key to ensuring your communications are relatable is to know your workforce and what appeals to each demographic. Some people love discount cards, others cheap gym memberships, for some it may be free mindfulness sessions. Whatever it is, you need to ensure that you are relating to your entire workforce to increase engagement across the business.
In summary
Increasing engagement between your people and their wellbeing benefits doesn’t have to be difficult – many of the issues causing poor engagement can be fixed by better use of technology, brand and language when communicating with your people.
When you are starting your search for better engagement rates, remember to keep our three top tips in mind:
- Promote: you’ve already got good wellbeing benefits to offer your people, so ensure you send the message in the right way. Benefit communications about topics that seem irrelevant to some of your workforce will make them switch off and disengage altogether. Ensure you communicate about the benefits your people need.
- Technology: take advantage of new, efficient technology such as a benefits platform or nudge technologies. This will make accessing your benefits much more simple and interactive for your people.
- Relate: get to know your people and use what you know to better relate and target your benefits communications to them.
This article is provided by Johnson Fleming.
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