Four Tips To Help You Get The Most From Your Investment In Employee Benefits

Your benefit costs probably represent 30% of your total compensation costs. Are you getting the most from this investment? Do your staff members know what's available to them and appreciate how valuable it is? Here are four tips to help you get the most out of your investment.

1.    Require everyone to make an active enrollment decision. If you currently use an opt-in approach (you are not enrolled unless you fill out and submit the appropriate forms), consider forcing everyone to make an active decision. In the book Nudge, they state that "One company switched from an opt-in regime to active decisions and found that participation rates increased by about 25 percentage points." Obviously, you're not getting the most out of your investment if employees don't have services when they need them the most.

2.    Make it easy to act. Use tip sheets, check lists, and comparison charts to convey information in an easy to understand format. Use simple enrollment forms that are easy to complete. Carriers will often give you a complex enrollment form that includes benefits you don't even offer. Push back a little and they'll tailor a form to meet your needs.

3.    Communicate all year long. Don't just communicate about benefits during open enrollment. Provide information throughout the year through any and every means available — print, intranet, social media, and most valuably, in-person. Tailor communication to known needs. For example, give new parents a check list of things they need to consider.

4.    Include family members in your communications. Families make up a large portion of your benefit costs and in most families, one spouse takes the lead in managing insurance benefits. If you're only communicating with your employees, you may not be getting the information to the decision maker in each family. Many organizations make the mistake of putting all their benefits information on their intranet essentially locking it down behind a firewall. Post your benefits information on a site that's available to all the people in your insured group like Benergy. Use blogs and Facebook to reach people where they are. For example, I recently wrote a blog post about saving money on prescription drugs and then linked to it on our wellness Facebook page and our intranet.

If you don't have the resources internally to take your benefit communications to the next level, ask your broker for help or take a look at what Benz Communications or Context has to offer. Your staff members are more likely to appreciate the benefits you're spending so much money on when you do a good job of structuring the decisions they need to make and educating them.

Janet McNichol, SPHR, CAE, is the Human Resources Director at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. She is passionate about health and wellness and blogs about her experience managing ASHA's program at Inside Workplace Wellness.

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