Research shows that an employee benefits communication strategy boosts engagement, reduces employee sick leave and improves loyalty. This has been shown to be particularly effective if your employee benefits package includes health and wellbeing schemes. An effective employee benefits communication plan can therefore be an extremely important tool.
Assess your workforceThe first thing you’ll need to do is assess your workforce to see what they respond well to. Every company is different and there’s no set way of communicating benefits to employees that will work for everyone.
This can be done through a survey or through assessing the user behaviour on your employee benefits platform or assessing how your employees use the benefits you have on offer. If you have an employee benefits platform, you could use Google Analytics for this. You’ll need to really understand your workforce in order to set up an effective employee benefits communication plan.
Decide on how you’ll communicate your messageThe next step is to decide on the medium through which you want to communicate your message. These could include:
- Printed materials
- Companywide emails
- Messaging/notifying through your employee benefits platform
- Company workshops/events
Printed MaterialsPrinted materials don’t just need to be internal posters. These are effective but can become outdated very quickly. Renewing them regularly can help but you’ll need to come up with some more innovative ways to get people’s attention.
For example, if you were promoting a gym membership scheme you could offer out branded water bottles or gym towels to your employees to promote the scheme.
Companywide EmailsCompanywide emails can be an effective tool as part of your employee benefits communication strategy, particularly in an office environment.
However, as with any email campaign, sending out too many emails in a short space of time will make them less effective. Be selective when you send out emails promoting your schemes.
Messaging/Notifying Through Your Employee Benefits PlatformMessaging or notifying employees through your benefits platform can be effective, however you need to make sure they’re accessing the platform in the first place. This kind of communication needs to work alongside other forms of communication in order to help employees make the most of the schemes on offer.
Try sending out notifications or messages to all employees on your platform whilst using other forms of communication to let them know there’s a message waiting for them that will help them make the most of the schemes on offer.
Company WorkshopsCompany workshops can be a very effective part of your employee benefits communication strategy, specifically how to make use of the employee benefits schemes on offer to them.
Again you’ll need to make sure that you tie this in with other ways of communicating benefits to employees. Use your posters and emails to promote these workshops.
When communication your employee benefits package, you’ll need to make sure you both understand your employees and make the best use of your communication tools. You can’t have one or the other unless you want your employee benefits communication plan to be an effective one. You can only reap the full rewards of offering employee benefits if they are communicated effectively.
