Benefits Communications
Annual Benefits Enrollment
Benefits enrollment—aka open or annual enrollment—is that period of time when your people can elect or change their benefits options, including health, dental, vision, and life insurance, as well as enroll in voluntary benefits like legal services and pet insurance.
For many organizations, benefits enrollment is the most significant communications activity of the year. Not only is it a time to inform your people about benefit changes for the coming year and encourage them to enroll, but it’s also an opportunity to highlight your overall benefits and employee value proposition.
What We Can Do for You
Shopping for benefits should be just like shopping for anything else. When today’s workforce interacts with their benefits, they expect consumer-level experiences, which just happens to be our specialty.
We offer a full range of strategic communications services to craft the right enrollment experience for your organization. We can help you develop a winning strategy, refine the key messages your people need to hear, and choose the perfect mix of communications channels.
Enrollment experiences can include a variety of media, from printed materials to custom websites and short, attention-grabbing videos. Our custom websites run the gamut from clean, user-friendly information sites to online virtual benefits fairs that rival the in-person experience.
Change Management
Change isn’t always easy. Even when what’s changing is generally positive, you may have stakeholders who won’t make out so well. And some people just prefer the status quo. That’s why effectively communicating change is critical to achieving successful outcomes. That means communicating in a way that ensures that your people understand what’s changing, the rationale for the change, and the actions they may need to take.
What We Can Do for You
We can help you manage all aspects of organizational change, from changes to your plans and programs to mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures.
Effective change management starts with strategy. Whatever the change, we’ll work with you to develop an impact analysis that shows how all the relevant stakeholder groups will be specifically affected by the change. Using this analysis, we develop key messages for the different stakeholder groups and a tactical communications plan that details which communications will be distributed to the stakeholder groups and when. Then we execute the plan and create successful outcomes for you and your organization. Easy!
New Benefits and Program Launches
You’ve done all the work to determine that a new benefit or program will help you achieve your business objectives. That’s great! But you won’t realize the full value of your new offering if your people don’t know about it. From the day you launch the new benefit or program, you need to communicate to your people what’s available to them and how it can make their lives better.
What We Can Do for You
To help you get your message out and ensure that the program launch goes as smoothly as possible, our expert staff will work with you to develop a change management strategy and communications plan with key messages, audiences, timing, and media. Let us do all the heavy lifting in developing and executing a campaign that’s in line with the program changes you’re making. It’s our job to make the change a success for your organization.
Behavior Change and Engagement
Are your people missing out on the full 401(k) match that your organization offers? Are they getting the most from tax savings vehicles like health savings accounts (HSAs)? Are they going to the emergency room for illnesses or injuries that could easily be treated at an urgent care clinic? Whatever need you have, our communications strategies and campaigns can change behaviors and help your people get the most from the plans and programs you offer.
If you want your people to appreciate the total rewards package you’re offering, you need them to be aware of it and to know how to get the most out of it. Engagement and behavior change don’t happen automatically. To achieve a desired outcome, you need a strategy and well-executed campaign.
What We Can Do for You
Whether you’re trying to modify specific behaviors or you’re just seeking better engagement with your plans and programs, we’ll develop a strategy designed to achieve your goals. We’ll tap into behavioral science to understand what’s really keeping your people from getting the most from your plans and programs and then use those findings to increase engagement.
We’ll create a detailed strategy that will serve as your blueprints for success. Then, using the strategy as a guide, we’ll create a multimedia communications campaign. Do you want your people to increase their HSA balances? Use mental health resources more? No matter what you want to accomplish, we’ll work with you to make it happen.
Benefits Equity and Inclusion
Business leaders know that building a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) culture is a business imperative. Both your current workers and job seekers value employers dedicated to DEI in the workplace. They want an inclusive work environment, and that means access to health, wellness, and family benefits that support them in every aspect of their lives.
However, your people and prospective new hires won’t know about your DEI commitment if you don’t communicate it effectively.
What We Can Do for You
We can create a communications strategy and campaigns to help you tell your compelling DEI story, and we can work with you to make your benefits and rewards communications more DEI-forward.
We can also create an LGBTQ+ benefits guide for you that can help you achieve a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s (HRCF) Corporate Equality Index (CEI).
Health Care
Health care is one of the most important benefits you offer your workforce. It’s also one of the most expensive. Many people don’t think about or fully understand their health care benefits until they have a situation where they need to use them.
Health care benefits are complicated. So it’s no surprise that employers often struggle with communicating about these benefits to their people. The language is complex, and there’s a lot of it. Navigating through all the minutiae can be challenging.
If you don’t simplify health care lingo into bite-sized, easy-to-understand chunks of information, your people likely won’t be able to get the most out of their benefits. Getting them to engage in the right programs at the right time helps generate a return on that large investment you make in health care. This requires investing time and energy into creating a knockout benefits communications game plan. That’s where we come in.
What We Can Do for You
We have a deep understanding of the technical, legal, and plan-design aspects of health care benefits. We can create strategies and campaigns to help your people get the most from the plans and programs you offer by educating them about using their benefits wisely and taking the right steps to receive care. We can support your organization’s health care benefits by creating:
- Health savings account (HSA) promotions
- Comparison guides and tools for your health care benefits
- Campaigns to educate your people about where and when to get physical and mental health support
- Websites, communications materials, and tools to help your people understand which benefits can support them, depending on their current needs
Mental Health
Just as with physical health, your people’s mental health requires ongoing maintenance. That’s why it’s so critical that they know about all the resources available to them to support their mental health and well-being.
What We Can Do for You
We can help your organization create a comprehensive mental health and well-being communications strategy. By taking a holistic approach that covers all parts of mental health care, from ongoing maintenance to help with specific needs, we can ensure that your people are aware of all the tools you provide to support them. We can also create materials to empower managers and other stakeholders in your organization to champion your mental health programs, which can help reduce the stigma that so often prevents people from seeking help.
Retirement and Financial Well-Being
Saving for the future. Investing. Paying off debt. Sounds easy enough. Turns out that designing optimal workplace savings plans and financial benefits are only part of the equation. Helping people understand how best to use these resources is just as important.
It can be hard for people just entering the workforce to think about retirement, or for people facing financial hardships to look beyond just covering their daily expenses. If you offer financial well-being resources, you want your people to understand what’s available to them and which resources are most applicable to their specific financial situations.
What We Can Do for You
We work with our clients to build customized communications campaigns and tools to better engage their participants. This work starts with analyzing your participant demographics, your people’s current behaviors, your workforce’s needs, and your current communications materials and practices. We then help you build long-term strategies based on your goals to help you reach your people more effectively and inspire them to take action. Whether you’re looking to improve retirement plan participation rates, help people understand important plan design changes, increase people’s understanding of their financial benefits, or promote investing in a health savings account (HSA), we’ll bring our award-winning approach to help you develop an effective strategy and multichannel communications to do just that.
Too often, retirement and financial communications are complex and full of jargon. That’s how we can help. We specialize in fusing the latest insights from behavioral science with marketing and communications best practices to help people appreciate and get the most from their workplace savings plans and other financial benefits.
What we do:
- Holistic financial well-being campaigns
- Introduction of new financial benefits and their features
- Introduction of new funds, including retirement income
- Retirement plan change communications
- Retirement plan marketing and education
- Targeted and segmented communications campaigns
- Defined benefit pension and defined contribution plan communications
Holistic Well-Being
How well do you work with distractions? If you’re like most individuals, you probably don’t perform at your highest level when your mind is on other things. When your people are having troubles with any facet of their well-being—physical, emotional, financial—everything can become more difficult for them. You may have great well-being benefits to support them, but your people may not know about them or how to access them.
What We Can Do for You
We create well-being communications strategies that align with your organization’s goals, and we translate those strategies into outreach that increases engagement. We strive to empower your population to improve their holistic well-being and regain their focus.
We can create needs-based campaigns to help your people connect the benefits you offer with whatever life is throwing at them at any given moment. We simplify information and curate content, so your people can easily find what’s most pertinent to them.
Leaves and Paid Time Off
What benefit do workers consider most important? Turns out it’s the ability to get away from work. According to a recent study from Unum, paid time off and paid family leave top the list of non-insurance benefits that people value most. By now, it’s no secret that offering a broad suite of leave programs can be your key differentiator in the marketplace. And when your culture supports people taking time away from work, you’ll reap the benefits when they return.
What We Can Do for You
Whether you’re rolling out a new time-off program, need help promoting your current time-off benefits, or just need to make sure people understand the basics of your LOA and time-off programs, we can help! We can’t overstate the value of a well-designed and properly communicated time-off program. By providing the right information at the right time, you can address your people’s most commonly asked questions and make the process easier for everyone.
Leave-of-absence processes can sometimes be complicated and require multiple steps for your people, their managers, and HR team members. Now more than ever, it’s a good time to ask yourself a few questions about how you communicate your LOA and PTO benefits. Does your company culture encourage people to relax and recharge? Are your communications easy to understand, intuitive, and supportive for all stakeholders?
What we do:
- Develop time-off communications campaigns that support your EVP
- Introduce and promote paid time off (PTO), including unlimited time-off programs
- Introduce and promote LOA enhancements
- Create time-off program change communications
- Provide leave-of-absence education and intuitive resources for all stakeholders
- Explain to employees and managers how time off and leave programs work alongside flexible and hybrid work
Benefits Compliance Communications
Laws surrounding health and retirement benefits can be difficult for HR professionals to understand. Imagine how tough they are for your people to decipher!
What We Can Do for You
We specialize in taking complex information and distilling it into easy-to-understand, approachable messaging for your people. Our communications team works closely with Segal’s nationally recognized compliance practice to ensure that your benefits program is effective and legally compliant.
We can help with:
- SPD drafting
- The SECURE 2.0 Act
- Mental health parity
- HIPAA
- The No Surprises Act
- Medigap policies
- Creating summaries of material modification
- ARPA pension relief
- ERISA compliance
