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About the series
The COVID-19 pandemic made it abundantly clear that employees place significant value on their health and wellbeing benefits.
Over the past two years, benefits communication played a critical role in improving the employee experience (EX) during challenging and stressful times. So, what did organizations do differently, and how can employers maintain the momentum to further transform their benefits communication EX?
Benefits communication and EX
We define the employee experience as the sum of all the touchpoints and moments that matter between employees and their employer.
Organizations provide benefits to protect employees for times when they face life’s expected and unexpected moments — struggling with anxiety or depression, wrestling with caregiving issues for children or elder family members, facing a cancer diagnosis, and more. In the context of the past two years, benefits and wellbeing support helped employees take care of the most important things in their lives — family, relationships and personal wellbeing, to name a few.
Benefits communication is about supporting your people when they are making important decisions about their lives, families and futures. It’s a moment to build trust with your employees, inspire thoughtful decisions and drive meaningful change today and tomorrow. The ultimate impact is an engaged and productive workforce. According to our research on identifying the factors that make high-performance employee experience (HPEX), companies with more effective EX outperform their peers for top-line growth, bottom-line profitability and return to shareholders.
The story of 2020 and 2021: Elevating benefits communication
In 2020 and 2021, employers quickly reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic with enhanced benefits communication — highlighting tools, resources and programs available to help employees with emerging needs, from virtual care to mental health and caregiver support and beyond.
Employers took the time to listen to employees, then they responded to employees’ areas of concern. What employees value has shifted as a result of the pandemic and prompted people to re-evaluate what’s important in their lives. Gathering insights from employees is the best way to design and communicate programs that respond to these shifts.
Employers rethought how they engage with employees and their families — accelerating their digital strategies and making the "need to know" information accessible and clear. They utilized digital resources such as public microsites easily accessible outside the company’s firewall, text messaging, videos and interactive learning modules, as well as open enrollment virtual benefits fairs featuring live chat with vendors and the company’s HR or benefits team.
So what’s next? How can employers evolve, enhance and continue to transform their benefits communication EX?
What’s next: Maintaining the momentum in 2022
Data trends from WTW's 2022 Global Benefits Attitude Survey suggest employees should lean into three key enrollment themes to continue supporting their employees in a meaningful way. Employers should:
- Emphasize the security that your holistic benefits package provides and what you are doing to help support employees during benefits enrollment and throughout the year
- Showcase choice to your diverse employee population through creative program design, decision-making support, and modernized communications before, during, and after benefits enrollment
- Make it easy to prepare for, enroll, and use benefits by communicating often and in a personalized manner using technology, throughout the benefits enrollment process
Now is the time for employers to focus on listening, education, support and engagement to help ensure employees feel the full impact of the investments made in their benefits and wellbeing programs.
| What we saw in 2021 | How to maintain the momentum in 2021 |
|---|---|
| A new focus on listening and gathering insights from the workforce through pulse surveys, virtual focus groups, outreach to employee resource groups and more. | Employers should develop intentional, ongoing employee listening strategies with regular check points that help them take the pulse and understand evolving workforce sentiments and needs. How does this look? Depending on the organization and culture, a listening strategy likely includes several short pulse surveys throughout the year combined with live listening sessions such as virtual focus groups. |
| Intentional messaging focused on areas of employee concern. Ongoing communication that is simple, short and easy to understand — no HR jargon. | Employers can take their ongoing messaging to the next level by building a year-round communication calendar focused on employee wellbeing. Month-by-month and quarter-by-quarter content might be organized around important events or employee journeys. The content should include storytelling — highlighting real employees when possible — and should play out across a variety of media to capture attention. A communication editorial calendar should consider how to support different audiences, such as managers of people, with talking points, toolkits and training as well. Managers remain on the front lines with their employees, and they should understand the programs available to support employee needs. As mental health and emotional wellbeing concerns affect many employees today, managers should receive training on how to build their personal resilience, as well as how to listen and support their team. |
| New ways to reach people where they are — individually, physically and emotionally — through microsites, text messaging, videos, interactive learning modules, virtual benefits fairs, personalized communication platforms, and more. | Employers must evolve their digital strategy and continue to use these tools in new ways. For example, broad email newsletters can become segmented emails based on various employee groups/eligibility. Videos might evolve into podcasts. A public microsite could change to provide targeted or even personalized content. An open enrollment virtual benefits fair might become a virtual wellbeing fair. |
A critical moment, done right
The lack of awareness employees have about the benefits programs their employers offer became increasingly visible over the past year. Employers must focus on knitting these programs together in a way that makes them engaging and accessible when people really need them. More than half of employers (52%) have taken action to enhance the enrollment experience, while another third (34%) are looking to do so. With more than half of all employees working remotely or a mix of onsite and remotely, meeting employees where they are, no matter the location, time of day, or what device, is a must. This means taking accessibility into consideration too – supporting those who are neurodiverse, colorblind, or suffer from decision-making anxiety – and making it easy for all people will ensure your approach is inclusive.
Delivering a modern, digital, employee-focused experience requires thoughtful planning.
As employers organize their content and move toward targeted and personalized digital communication, the company intranet and a list of links will only go so far. Delivering a modern, digital, employee-focused experience requires thoughtful planning to effectively raise awareness, increase program utilization and engagement.
Employers have taken the time to research and carefully choose each vendor in their partner ecosystems, but are employees leveraging their benefits to the fullest potential? If there’s even a question, consider bringing everything together and creating a cohesive, user-friendly and navigable technology-enabled employee experience across those partners. It’s a new one-stop-shop.
A flexible content delivery platform can provide a cross-vendor, individualized digital experience — serving up relevant content based on an employee’s data and eligibility. The right tool brings together rich personalization, data-driven recommendations and dynamic publication controls, putting employers in control of the EX while fully maximizing vendor partners’ services and programs.
Wrapping up
At its best, a great employee experience enables you to showcase the comprehensive array of resources that you have invested in on behalf of employees — and, even better, employees get what they need, when they need it (because they know how to find it and use it).
No matter how you handled benefits communications over the last two years — whether you took simple steps or major leaps toward a better EX — now is the time to prepare to make the most of your opportunities in 2022. The goal is an engaged workforce with a positive EX — in both the best of times and the worst of times.
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