New employees will always be as keen as mustard to learn about the benefits on offer to them. Chances are the personal relevance of your offering was what attracted them to your business in the first place. It’s an exciting time when a new hire joins a business and they will be taking in a lot of well-intended information and advice. But as they settle in the real work starts. Their time and energy is invested in getting on with their job.
If you haven’t got a consistent communications plan to keep your new starters and employees engaged then they can quickly forget about the benefits on offer or lose interest. Low uptake and poor engagement are often rooted in benefits irrelevance and employee inertia. A sustained communication plan throughout the year can help rebalance all of this and help you keep track of your employees’ evolving attitudes, motivators, values and goals to boost engagement and improve relevancy and uptake.
Putting your plan together
If you are looking at how you can better communicate your benefits plan then take the time to get it right. You need to work out the ‘who’ ‘why’ and ‘how’. To do this, taking a leaf out of your marketing colleagues’ engagement handbook will be a big help.
Understanding the ‘who’
Marketing teams live and breathe this stuff. They map out their strategy to reach an external target audience with laser-guided precision. They will understand their audience and build personas to make sure everything they do is tailored to the specifics of a particular group. They will set goals. They will understand the content formats and channels that work the hardest in reaching specific people with targeted, personalised messaging at scale.
Mapping out a communications plan for an internal audience is no different. You will need to understand your employees at a more granular level and tailor your communications plan to influence individual behaviours and strike a personal chord.
Working out the ‘why’
Here are a couple of questions to think about:
- Where is your organisation at now?
- What are your goals?
- How will actively promoting and discussing your benefits package help achieve these goals?
You’ll then need to work out the ‘how’
- What information do your employees need?
- Do you need to simplify documentation? When you think that only four in ten workers think their employer’s benefit communication is simple to understand this could be an important jumping-off point.
- Do you need to build a resource hub to centralise documentation?
- What content formats will you use – do your employees prefer printed materials, videos, infographics or podcasts, etc?
- What channels will you use?
- Do you have the right technology and communications tools?
- Are you able to give extra training to influential employees who can help promote your plan on the ground?
- Do you reward feedback?
These are just a few questions to explore to help you build the foundations of a consistent employee benefits communications plan for your organisation. There will be more questions - there always are - but we hope you find this helpful in getting started.
Rethinking your plan? Let’s talk to see how we can help.
