by Joe Larocque, director of content development, GuideSpark
Over a short period of time, Web 2.0 technologies have fundamentally changed the way people learn. The employee of today expects rich, engaging learning experiences available on demand. Yet today’s employers focus on thick handbooks and text-heavy web pages as the anchor of their benefits communications strategy. To be successful, employers must recognize the shrinking attention spans of employees and align their communications approach to how employees get information today.
Effective Benefits Communication
A number of trends highlight the limitations of traditional benefits communications solutions, including benefits handbooks, text-heavy web pages, and live seminars. Many employers struggle to find solutions that solve their issues in a cost-effective manner. Fortunately, recent advances have made leveraging the latest web technologies much more affordable and effective.
Current Trends
A number of trends have emerged, making effective benefits communications more difficult:
Increasingly distributed workforces. Workforces are becoming more and more distributed. In fact, according to Gartner Dataquest, 27.5% of U.S. workers will telecommute in 2009, which is nearly double the penetration seen in 2000. Do current solutions cost-effectively meet the challenges presented by changing demographics?
Frequent benefits changes, added complexity. Benefits and compensation programs are changing more frequently. New initiatives such as high-deductible health care and Roth 401(k) plans add complexity, and the financial consequences of poor decisions are getting larger. How can companies provide timely, effective education to ease the impact of increasingly complicated benefits and compensation offerings?
Information overload. In the typical organization, there are no shortages of emails, documents, and websites competing for an employee’s attention. The average employee will likely have to visit over a dozen internal and vendor websites, paging through lengthy benefits handbooks, brochures, and web pages to find the information he or she needs. How can HR departments command necessary attention for their important communications?
Companies can solve many of their benefits communications issues by providing employees with benefits learning experiences that are rich, engaging, and available anytime, anywhere. As demonstrated, traditional approaches to benefits communications have limitations. Live seminars can be effective but lack reach and efficiency. Conversely, electronic documents and text-heavy web pages can provide reach and efficiency but have proven to be largely ineffective.
Five Ways to Leverage Web 2.0 to Transform Benefits Communications
Web 2.0 is a term that refers to the second generation of the web that aims to move away from static web pages to facilitate interaction, information sharing and collaboration. These ideas, trends, and technologies have redefined the way employees learn today. Unfortunately, nearly all of the innovation has occurred out on the consumer web, and many organizations have yet to incorporate these new, high-impact ways of communicating. The following five recommendations focus on how Web 2.0 techniques improve access, increase effectiveness, and extend the breadth of benefits communications.
1. Provide Universal Access to Benefits Learning and Communications
Upgrading your benefits communications should start by moving away from static intranet sites and text documents. Instead, organizations should offer interactive learning experiences and centralize benefits education to eliminate confusion about where to go to get information. Further, in a world where families make up 60%-70% of an employer’s health care costs and are often the ones making the benefits decisions, it becomes critical that vital information not be locked behind the firewall. With distributed workforces and their families in mind, gaining on-demand access to comprehensive and consistent benefits education should require nothing more than a standard web browser. The content on the site should be searchable so that employees are able to locate topics of interest easily, and the learning segments should be modular so that employees can tailor their learning experience.
Once created, this site becomes an ideal place not only to provide 24/7 access to benefits education but also to facilitate communications and learning required for key HR events, such as open enrollment and new hire training.
2. Engage Employees with Short-Form Multimedia
Multimedia has exploded on the web, making it a common form of information. YouTube, for example, served up 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009, and approximately 65,000 new videos are added daily. Many of YouTube’s channels have now become dedicated to the fast-growing “how to” category, educating visitors on everything from credit card interest to health and fitness.
The explosion of multimedia has made learning on the web much more engaging. Aside from the richness of the medium, part of what makes the multimedia format so compelling is the short-form approach. The web user of today has ever-shorter attention spans accelerated by services like YouTube, with an average video length of under 10 minutes. Blog writers have an average of 96 seconds to get their point across and Twitter reduces communication to 140 characters.
When you compare these trends to your thick benefits handbook, it becomes clear why lengthy text-based approaches have been such a disappointment. The key to being successful in a Web 2.0 world is acknowledging these constraints and optimizing your communications approach for the web. For instance, while video is effective, recording an hour-long benefits seminar that is designed to be given live and posting it on the web likely won’t get you the results you desire.
To communicate benefits effectively, you will want to modularize your content to provide employees with short bursts of information in five- to 15-minute increments. Finally, to maximize the effectiveness of your benefits communications, your short-form multimedia content must be customized. Off-the-shelf content lacks personalization, branding, and does not advance your value proposition. The good news here is that the days of $1,000/minute for custom eLearning are behind us. Cost-effective solutions for creating customized education are now available.
3. Communities and Shared Learning
In February 2009, social network usage exceeded that of email for the first time. Since 2003, the number of minutes spent on member communities has grown a staggering 883% and has represented the fastest-growing category that Nielsen tracks for the 12 months ended February 2009.
In the user-centric Web 2.0 world, leveraging the wisdom of communities has been a core theme; social collaboration services are skyrocketing in today’s enterprise. The web has become a marketplace of ideas and experiences and such features as ratings, comments, and message boards allow users to learn from one another or from readily accessible experts. By implementing polls and surveys, employers enable their employees to understand what decisions have been made by others in the community, which can be tremendously helpful when approaching decisions such as benefits elections.
4. Leverage New Forms of Communication
Blogs have become a popular and highly effective form of communications serving as legitimate news outlets, training grounds, and learning platforms. For instance, blogs are now recognized by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as being sufficient notification of company news relevant to investing. A recent study by the Learning Guild showed 35% year-over-year growth in the use of blogs as a corporate training method for corporations of more than 500 people. No discussion of new forms of communication would be complete without a mention of Twitter. Micro-blogs like Twitter allow users to communicate “knowledge nuggets” in bite-sized increments. These technologies add a new dimension to your benefits communication strategy.
In essence, they allow you to stay in front of employees through short and frequent communications. Further, such technologies have become hugely popular on mobile phones, providing increased reach to your message.
5. Implement Tools to Personalize Benefits
Web 2.0 solutions go beyond standard information delivery to integrate interactive tools and applications that can enhance the benefits learning experience. For instance, planning tools and calculators can supplement benefits communications and personalize offerings to an employee’s particular situation. Checklists and assessments that help employees understand their money behaviors create momentum and enable employees to move beyond education to taking action—the key to any successful learning. Lastly, whether an employee prefers email, phone, live seminars, or chat, integrating access to personalized expert help can greatly enhance the overall learning experience. Web technologies now allow the seamless integration of such personalized services and tools within a company’s overall benefits communications solution.
Unlock Benefits ROI with Modern, Effective Communications
Effective employee communications are critical to ensuring that companies maximize the return on their benefits investment. After all, employees can only appreciate and value what they understand. Using modern communications strategies, employers can impact company performance in the following ways:
- Reduce voluntary turnover. Studies have shown that companies with highly effective benefits communications are 80% more likely to report lower turnover rates than their peers.1 When you consider that the average cost to replace an employee is $21,430,2 employers have much to gain by investing in communications programs.
- Do more with less. In a recent survey, employees gave higher marks to employers who provided fewer benefits but explained them well, rather than a richer array of benefits they didn’t understand.3 In this tough environment, effective benefits communications give employers the opportunity to cut budgets and programs without cutting value.
- Cut costs through improved participation. Employee participation in programs such as high-deductible health care plans, flexible spending accounts and 401(k) plans can save employers significant dollars. In fact, the right benefits communication strategy can reduce the cost of benefits by 10%-20% a year.4 A well-educated workforce will make benefits decisions that are best for them and their employer.
- Reduced support costs. A lack of benefits understanding forces employers into reactively supporting employees in the most costly way—through call center and human resource department inquiries. Proactive strategies for educating employees can eliminate questions, thereby shrinking call centers and freeing up HR professionals to work on more strategic projects.
With substantial investments at stake, employers simply cannot afford to accept failing rates of benefits understanding among employees. Web 2.0 is here and represents an affordable way for employers to deliver effective benefits communications to today’s employee.
Joe Larocque is director of content development at GuideSpark, a provider of employee benefits communications and financial wellness solutions. Leveraging the latest web techniques, GuideSpark is enabling employers to realize the full value of benefits investments through rich and engaging benefits communications. For more information, visit www.guidespark.com or email at info[at]guidespark.com.
2 Employee Job Satisfaction & Retention Survey 2007/2008,” Salary.com, January 2008
3 WorkUSA Survey, Watson Wyatt Worldwide, 2005
4 J. Kalamaz, P. Mango, and D. Ungerman, “Linking Employee Benefits to Talent Management,” The McKinsey Quarterly, September 2008.