Benefits communication is one of those topics that everyone hates to love…or just hates. There are rules and procedures in place that make being fun with benefits communication almost impossible. Today I attended a session titled, Perception is Reality: Best Practices in Benefits Communication” with Mary Schafer of ADP. For those who are new to benefits you’ll quickly learn that getting people to enroll in different programs can be a challenge, especially with rising costs and uncertainty on how Obamacare is really beneficial for the everyday employee.

Mary spoke on some very crucial aspects  aspects of benefits communication that allow practitioners the ability to increase the number of registrations, beef up their communications strategies, and show management why investing in benefits communication is important to not only the employees, but management as a whole.

The benefits of benefits communication

There are four aspects of benefits communication that Mary spoke on that all practitioners could learn from and develop a more efficient strategy.

Connecting with your associates.

If you’re working in a larger company learning to connect with your associates can be a challenging learning curve. The amount of information that you have will seem overwhelming and having the ability to effectively communicate with your staff will be beneficial for you and your company. Having a strong benefits communication strategy allows the employer to recruit more efficiently because they’re able to showcase one of the most important parts of a job offer, benefits.

Enhance enrollment numbers.

This is pretty basic. The better you’re able to communicate benefits the higher your enrollment numbers will be which makes you and your company look good. All benefits employees have the number one goal of increasing overall enrollment numbers.

Streamlining benefits engagement.

Being able to streamline benefits communication allows companies the ability to reach different people who communicate in various ways. The session really didn’t expand on different forms of communications for benefits communication, but we’ll hit on that later this week as apart of our #shrm14 coverage, but as preview using social media, email communications, and even SMS services will allow you to take benefits communication to the next level.

Nurturing relationships.

From departments of 10 to 10,000 it can be difficult especially as an HR Departmnet  One to connect and nurture relationships with each of your employees. Having a strong benefits communication strategy and an open door policy will allow those relationships to built automatically without a lot of effort. Creating different benefits material will allow companies to showcase their benefits information to a wide range of people and keep them informed on your benefits information.

The time to change how you advertise and push out benefits information is now. Learning to adopt different strategies will allow your company to not only reach a broader audience, but increase overall enrollment numbers. Join us through Wednesday for coverage on the Society of Human Resource Management conference and sessions that we attend throughout the week.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of The Art of Benefits Communication.