How are you going to prioritize your day? Which exercise fits into your schedule? How will you connect with people in a meaningful way? What’s for dinner?
Decision making is a daily constant that can be both empowering and draining. The good news is that most people can get support for making both big and small decisions. After all, there are apps at every turn to guide, encourage, educate and congratulate. Even my refrigerator helps me decide what to have for dinner. It recommends a recipe based on the food I currently have — and adds missing ingredients to my e-grocery list.
Then there are the big decisions we make about finances, our and our family’s physical and emotional wellbeing, and our social health. This is where employers have an opportunity to shine (because no one’s fridge is going to be very helpful with these questions).
But delivering a modern, digital, employee-focused experience doesn’t just happen; it requires thoughtful planning to effectively raise awareness and help people move along an integrated wellbeing continuum.
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01
Build a cohesive plan across your partner ecosystem
Your vendor partners should offer excellent services for administering programs and encouraging positive behaviors. Yet, these exceptional offerings run the risk of leading to information overload. At best, too much information hampers effective education. At worst, employees simply tune it out.
It’s important for you to create a cross-vendor communication plan that properly paces individual calls to action. Your goal is to reach the right person at the right time through a personalized, segmented content strategy that drives behavior changes or improves employees’ perception of your programs. With something as simple as a calendar, you can coordinate vendor outreach and carefully plan who receives which messages and when.
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02
Personalize the plan
More and more partners can at least segment their education along certain specific dimensions such as employee type, industry or high-level program eligibility. Some vendors can also individualize their programs with scores or based on participation in the program.
Make sure you have a strong grasp of your vendors’ capabilities and factor those into your overall communication plan. This will help you bring your employment brand to life by delivering unique experiences that meet employees where they are in their personal and professional lives. Create objectives by vendor or program as well as by population segment and individual positions to ensure your employees only see and access the tools and information that are most important to them.
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03
Use intelligent software to execute the plan
We live in a mobile, social and on-demand world, and your employees want their HR experiences to keep pace. Your company intranet or a laundry list of articles in an internal database will only get you so far.
This is where a flexible content delivery platform can help you up your game by providing a cross-vendor, individualized digital experience. The right tool brings together rich personalization, data-driven recommendations and dynamic publication controls, all of which put you at the helm of your employee experience while fully maximizing your partners’ services and programs.
The ideal solution will serve as the face of HR to your employees, while freeing your HR team to drive strategic behavior change and business outcomes. In the end, you should be able to reallocate the time you’ve been spending on manual and tactical processes to higher-level strategic thinking.
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04
Use meaningful insights to create measurable impact
When you have an integrated, cross-vendor communication program, it brings multiple approaches to measurement and ways to solicit input. It takes work, but the payoff is huge.
Just as segmentation and personalization are meaningful tools in awareness and communication, micro-listening or lifecycle surveys are valuable tools for gathering insights. As you communicate with a select population, you can ask them a few, carefully designed questions using micro surveys. Or, as employees undergo different life events, lifecycle surveys will gather feedback close to those events.
These smaller scale insights are extremely valuable to help refine calls to action, gather insights on program design and complement traditional engagement-survey listening strategies.
Creating an employee experience that counts
You took time to research and carefully choose each vendor in your partner ecosystem, but are you leveraging them to their (and your employees’) fullest potential? If there’s even a question in your mind, it’s worth creating a cohesive and navigable employee experience across those partners. Delivering an immersive employee experience across talent, benefits, culture and rewards that is supported by intelligent software is achievable. And it doesn’t even have to connect to your fridge.
