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29 Oct 2018
by Joshua Croft

Top tips for communicating the value of your benefits package

Employee benefits packages are designed to send a positive message to your employees about your employer brand and demonstrate that your organisation values its people. They have long been a way to position your employee value proposition, to attract and retain talent, as well as boost engagement and loyalty. From a business point of view, it can help you manage your costs and get the most from your investment and experience a higher level of productivity.

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But the reality is, you may have implemented your benefits many years ago. Perhaps all your new employees weren’t involved with your initial launch – or they could have simply forgotten the benefits exist.

You’ve probably spent a lot of money on your employee benefits, so you want everyone to know all about them, use them and value them.

Here are some top tips to ensure that you are effectively communicating what you have on offer to get the most out of your investment.

Understand your audience

When it comes to employee benefits, different staff demographics will have different needs. For example, an employee who has recently graduated might be more interested in training and development opportunities rather than retirement benefits.

Offer a survey for your employees to complete to get a better understanding of their values. Such an exercise also demonstrates that you care and acknowledges the validity of staff input.

Use your management information

Use your data to measure when, where and how often your employees engage with your internal communications. Based on their data or activities you can deliver a truly tailored message and maximise your reach.

Integrating your core HR system and benefits platform is a great first step towards streamlining your data, which in turn will enable you to understand the behaviour and performance of your people more comprehensively – so you can design and introduce the most appropriate strategies for your organisation.

Build an engaging brand

Nothing engages quite like beautiful content. Creating your own internal brand for your employee benefits will help your employees become accustomed to seeing benefits communications and feel like they’re part of a stronger workplace community.

You could also look at expanding on your benefits brand around your business; posters, vinyl prints, flyers all incorporating your design will create familiarity with your employee benefits brand.

A great benefits brand clearly establishes its mission and values, and offers employees an experience that motivates them. Your company culture is unique and your brand should positively embrace and reflect this.

Your communications

The key to successful communications is to ensure they are regular, relevant and relatable. Although you may opt for a big-bang approach when you launch any new reward or benefit, it is important to keep communicating with your employees. In our experience, keeping up the momentum of your communications with a little and often approach can help maintain ongoing engagement. Try drip-feeding highlights or news about any employee achievements to help the flow of content.

Keeping communications regular and relevant can be hard when there is no new content to share. Try looking at ways you can engage your employees with an innovative approach. Things like sending out small surveys asking for suggestions or creating a buzz around your next announcement will keep your people looking out for what you’ll be doing next.

Keep it simple

You may know your benefits inside out but remember that your people may not be familiar with certain phrases. Keep the language in your communications simple, this will help staff understand what is available so they can make the most out of them.

Try to keep emails and any printed material eye-catching and clear, so that it quickly imparts information at a glance. Think of places around the business that may get a high level of footfall; a coffee break area, the kitchen, even the toilets are going to be places that the entirety of your staff demographic will use. It’s a perfect opportunity to put up some posters or leave leaflets to raise awareness of what you have on offer.

Promote wellbeing programmes

It has been well-documented that an improvement in employee wellbeing can result in improved performance; productivity and even job satisfaction.

Your people may not be aware of the full potential of their benefits package. If there are peak points of pressure in your business, highlighting some wellbeing programmes in your communications may increase the awareness of what is available. If they encourage staff to change their mind-set and access support services (such as to stop smoking), that can reduce absenteeism and productivity costs for your business.

Summary

Keeping up relevant communications can be a difficult task but by finding out more about your people’s needs, creating an identity they will recognise and, importantly, keeping in touch regularly will greatly improve the engagement with your benefits package.

The business value of communicating your benefits can be positive for both your return on investment and your employee value proposition, at little to no extra cost other than your time. In turn this can help with your staff retention, absenteeism, morale and productivity by increasing how valued your employees feel.

The author is Joshua Croft, associate consultant at Johnson Fleming.

This article was provided by Johnson Fleming.

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