Wages in the UK have declined, leading to monthly salaries becoming increasingly stretched as households tried to make ends meet. Yet despite this, employers are telling us that take up of their flexible benefits has decreased. This poses a mystery – if household budgets are suffering why aren’t employees taking up flexible benefits that could help them?
The answer lies in poor employee communication. Employers need to develop an internal communications strategy and plan for their flexible benefits scheme. And by doing so they can increase employee take up, and to make sure that they are not wasting the valuable resources their business is dedicating to its benefits offering.
5 golden rules
But how do you best communicate your scheme? Here are my five golden rules of employee benefits communication:
1. Outline the benefits to both prospective candidates and employees
Employees and prospective employees alike won’t want to spend time wading through pages and pages of benefit documentation so create a single page document that outlines the scheme and its benefits.
Remember to keep it free of jargon, talk about the benefits (what’s in it for me) rather than the features and spell out the benefits in terms your employees will understand. You should also make it interesting by adding testimonials from actual employees, even if they are anonymous.
Finally add a call to action that lets employees and prospective employees know that if they want more information, or to sign up, here’s what to do. And be sure to answer all queries in a timely fashion – delays lead to distractions and employees quickly lose interest.
2. The message needs to be consistent from top to bottom
When communicating your flexible benefit scheme there needs to be a clear consistent message from the senior leadership team down through managers to employees. Everyone has to be singing from the same hymn sheet.
However, this doesn’t mean you need to use exactly the same words to everyone. Tailor the message to suit your employees, think about segmenting your employees based either on their demographics and lifestyle and use easy to understand terms rather than HR jargon that may detract from your core purpose (to drive uptake and use of your scheme).
3. Utilise multiple communication channels
There isn’t a one channel fits all, you need to find out how your different employees like to communicate. Do your office workers like to find out information on noticeboards, intranets or via email? How do those rarely in the office access such information? This means that you will need to use several communication channels.
You may need some help. Recognise that sometimes communications aren’t best suited to HR teams and they are best left to the marketing team, this may mean the two teams need to work together closely or you may need to bring in an outsourced organisation to help you work on a communications strategy.
4. Brief senior managers, team leaders, and other key people in your organisation
When a senior manager or existing employee talks publicly about the benefits package, it gives it credibility, so be sure to brief key employees in your organisation about the available benefits.
Sound bites from these key individuals can be promoted both internally and externally to prospective employees.
5. Keep it going
Once you’ve started communicating your flexible benefits scheme to your employees it’s important to keep it going. Consistency and repetition is crucial, and that is why you need to develop an on-going communication plan.
You can keep the communications interesting with case studies from real life employees that show how the scheme has benefited them or perhaps have a focus period where you highlight a particular benefit, such as a month dedicated to the medical benefits you offer, followed by a month of communication on leisure benefits.
Communication is crucial to the success of a flexible benefits scheme. If you don’t already have a communications strategy for your scheme isn’t it about time you got one?
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