SLB’s Strategic Approach to Successful Benefits Communications Campaigns

Your Strategic Approach to Successfully Implement Benefit Communications Campaigns

Webinar Transcript:

Ron Miller: Hello, and thank you for joining today's special webcast, Mastering Benefits Communication, Your Strategic Approach to Successfully Implement Benefit Communications Campaigns. I'm Ron Miller, Senior Fellow in our Human Capital Center here at The Conference Board. Today, I'm joined by an esteemed panel from SLB and Segal Benz. Cassandra, it's all yours.

Cassandra Roth: Thanks, Ron. Hi, everyone. My name's Cassandra Roth and I'm so excited to be here. Today, I'm joined by my Segal Benz colleague, Gabby Kerrigan, and our clients at SLB, Lorraine Mah and Mary Von Tungeln. In this presentation, we'll be taking you through how to master your benefits communications. The key takeaway we want you to get from this presentation is that mastering your benefits communication is done through a well-thought-out strategy. This strategy allows you to successfully implement communications, not only meet the needs of your employee population, but also drive them to action. Then by doing this, you're going to create positive behavior change for your people over time. Oh, I'm sorry.

We will start the presentation by discussing how to create foundational strategy plans for your benefits and communications, and then we'll dive into how you can use that strategy and plan to align with company priorities. We'll conclude with walking you through how to execute communications with targeted outreach, and then we'll turn it over to you for Q&A. Before we dive into the fun stuff, let us formally introduce ourselves. As I said before, I'm Cassandra Roth. I'm a senior consultant here at Segal Benz. I have over 10 years of experience in employee communications with specific focus on employee engagement. I'm really passionate about developing results-driven total rewards, well-being, and compensation campaign strategies and deliverables.

I also have a big interest in new and innovative tools and technologies, and we'll talk a little bit about those today, including AI and augmented reality in communications to help drive employee engagement. I'll turn it over to Gabby to say hello.

Gabby Kerrigan: Awesome. Thanks so much, Cassandra. So, as Cassandra mentioned, my name is Gabby Kerrigan. I'm a consultant here at Segal Benz. I have seven years of experience working in HR and benefits communication. Like Cassandra, I'm very passionate about developing and implementing results-driven engagement strategies and helping our clients and their people better interact with their benefits and make informed decisions that will positively impact their total well-being.

With that, that's a perfect segue into who Segal Benz is as an organization. We are the communication practice of Segal, and we strive to help great organizations inspire people to improve their health, their finances, and their futures. With that, I'm so thrilled to introduce our clients at SLB to you. Lorraine, I'll turn it over to you first.

Lorraine Mah: Thanks, Gabby. Hi, everyone. My name's Lorraine Mah, and I'm excited to be here today with all of you. I currently lead North America Benefits for SLB. I've been with the organization for over 26 years. Let me start by telling you a little bit about who SLB is, formerly known as Schlumberger. We're a global energy and technology company. Our purpose is to create amazing technology that unlocks access to energy for the benefit of all. We have a global footprint in more than 100 countries with an employee population representing almost twice as many nationalities. That said, our people are the pulse and spirit of who we are.

Our talented employee population drives our purpose and integrity and fuels our belief that everyone should have the opportunity to reach their greatest potential. A key component of this is the benefit packages we offer that support our employees and their families and allows them to be their best selves both inside and outside of the workplace.

Mary Von Tungeln: Hey, everybody. My name's Mary Von Tungeln. I'm the Benefits Communication Manager at SLB. I work with Lorraine to develop, implement, and manage communication initiatives for SLB benefits here in the US. We're really excited to be here today. Well, we've worked with Segal Benz on several campaigns for various benefits. Today, we'll be focusing specifically on our 401K communications campaign where we communicate the enhancements to our 401K plan and increasing employee managing contributions. So, I'm going to throw it to Cassandra so she can take us forward.

Cassandra: Let's kick things off by building the foundation and talking a little bit about what goes into that. Before we do that, let's quickly set the stage on where our story began. SLB has been a Segal client for several decades, and in 2020, our Segal colleagues partnered with Jen Benz of Segal Benz to help Lorraine find a US benefits communication manager on her team. That US benefits communication manager is Mary. So, after that, Mary started in her role and Mary and Lorraine spoke about how they could elevate their benefits communications. At this time, Jen and I had offered to do a 10 keys assessment to help SLB understand what was working well when it came to their benefits communications and what could work differently.

Gabby: So at this point in the presentation, you may be thinking to yourself, "What is a 10 keys assessment?" We're here to tell you. In the early years of Benz Communications, which was acquired by Segal in 2018 to form Segal Benz, Jen recognized 10 different components that our most successful clients were implementing to create engaging benefits communication campaigns. So, these components include what you see here on screen. They're broken up into three categories: foundation, marketing, and resources. After these components were identified, Jen paired them with behavioral economics to create a framework for our clients, which is known as the 10 keys assessment.

As Cassandra mentioned, we often conduct a 10 keys assessment to identify what's working well for our clients and what needs extra attention. All of this to say before you work with your team to plot out your strategy, it really helps to get organized. The 10 keys assessment for SLB specifically allowed us to all take a step back and evaluate their situation when it came to their benefits communications. So, Mary and Lorraine, as we began our partnership together, we first conducted the 10 keys assessment and then we really work to establish three priority areas that we want to focus on when building out our strategy. Mary, can you talk to us a little bit more about that?

Mary: When we did the initial 10 keys assessment, it really allowed us to take a step back from our everyday routine, those tactical things we all do, the emails, the updating content pages. You get your head buried, but it helped us pick our heads out and identify what we wanted to do differently, how we wanted to do it, what we could do more of, less of. I think you get the picture. So, this is really where our three priorities came about that influenced our strategy going forward. The first thing was is that we felt the timing was right to solicit additional feedback from employees.

A lot of things have changed post-COVID to find out how they felt about their benefits at the time, what they needed more of, and really just what they wanted to see and benefits for them and their families. The second was building our strategy around more measurable results. It's great to know where you're going, but how do you really know when you've gotten there? One thing that really came to the top was ensuring that we were leveraging the capabilities from our benefits partners to get these results. We all have partners in this business who have deep data, deep research, a lot of analytics, and they have many ideas on how to engage the population.

So, we wanted to make sure that we can't do it all, but that we're getting the most that we can out of the things that are already there. Then finally, we wanted to make it easier for employees and their families to access and digest information. We have a very diverse workforce, a lot of different facilities, a lot of different parts of the countries, different jobs, et cetera, and so on. So, we wanted to make sure that we were utilizing all the available communication channels and in some cases, thinking about some new ones. I'll ask Lorraine. Lorraine, is there anything you want to add here too?

Lorraine: I think Mary, one thing to add is that our goal for North America Benefits at SLB is flexibility and offering support to our employees through the various phases of their lives. So, we really needed our communications to help convey this goal in a new and engaging way. So, by doing the 10 keys assessment and identifying these three priority areas was a great starting point for us and allowing to identify what we needed to do better when it came to benefits communication strategy to ensure that employees really understood all of the offerings we had and how they and their families could benefit from them.

Cassandra: Lorraine, I know that your first priority area was to solicit more feedback from employees, and you did do that. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that was like?

Mary: Sure. So, after we identified the priority areas, we worked with our partners at Segal and other benefits partners to analyze trends in our total rewards, not just ours, but also external data. Then we released a US company-wide survey to employees to better understand how they felt when it came to their total rewards. I think Lorraine can share with us some interesting findings there.

Lorraine: Absolutely, Mary. The biggest finding from the survey was that 72% of the respondents noted that they'd like a higher match to their 401K. So, this made this the top vote for benefit changes amongst our survey respondents. So, we took this employee feedback and then with our colleague, Jonathan Eaves who leads the US retirement benefits among other partners, we built a business case for increasing the employee match. So, after this business case was approved, we were able to implement a plan provided employees who contributed 10% to the 401K plan and additional 10% from SLB. The changes we implemented rewarded those who are contributing and also provided all employees regardless of whether or not they contributed a 2% contribution from SLB towards their retirement.

Ron: That's amazing, Lorraine. It sounds like this had a really impactful change, especially for people previously not contributing to their 401K and getting an automatic contribution from SLB. Would you agree?

Lorraine: Yes, Ron, it was super impactful. It meant that 100% of our SLB employees have money being contributed to their 401K from SLB.

Gabby: Lorraine, that's really impressive. It seems like the employee feedback was really fundamental in building your business case. Would you agree with that as well?

Lorraine: Yes, I would agree with that as well, Gabby. We had a good understanding of where we wanted to go with our enhanced 401K match, but the employee survey really solidified this for us. It gave us the backing we needed for our business case to make the changes as well to secure a communications budget, and it supported our decision making overall.

Cassandra: Thanks, Lorraine. So, as you can see through Lorraine and Mary's experience with the employee survey, they made this data point the center of their benefits communications strategy. They listened to what employees said, and they made that business case and implemented it. After that increase for the 401K match was approved, we had several conversations with SLB to understand the why behind all of these changes and the value that they placed on employees and their needs. So, through this, we were able to get in tune with SLB, including overall objectives for offering an enhanced match and how this could help drive SLB's business results. In these conversations, we learned a ton about SLB.

SLB has such a unique energy. It's full of people doing big jobs who have big responsibilities at work and at home, and we really wanted to bring that energy to life through our communications. So, this meant that our outreach needed to be powerful, energizing, and as bold as SLB's people. If you're finding yourself in this position where you're reconsidering your benefits strategy, start with your why and then use that to set your goals and objectives to align with your why. From here, you can map out your audience, campaign tactics, and then build out your deliverables. A key thing to note when you're building out your strategy is that one of the things that we work with SLB on doing is regularly measuring your communication's effectiveness.

It's not enough to just implement and set it and forget it. You need to continue to measure. So, your organization may have many measurement and data sources to choose from, such as open rates on emails, program participation rates, web traffic. You name it. What's important is that you access and use these data points to inform your strategy. With the 401K match specifically, one of our key data points was how much employees were contributing before the enhancement and how much they were contributing after the enhancement. We'll talk a little bit more about that in the coming slides, but as we think about strategy, we think about it as a cyclical process.

You know that your goals are going to change as you learn new things and you should never be afraid to change your strategy. Use those lessons that you're learning and adapt and it'll only help you in the long run. I just glossed over strategy very quickly. We're making it look pretty easy, but let's face it. It's really not. There are hurdles your organization is going to face when it comes to strategy. A few of the most common challenges that we hear is resource constraints. That includes people who have the capacity to work on a strategy like this, having the budget in terms of time or money to hire experts. Another common challenge is demographic or job type differentiators.

That means different types of people working different jobs, age, how they're getting their information, people in different time zones, working hours, different norms, culturally. You name it. Then lastly, a big one we see is differences in benefits, support, and resources by location, which can be really hard to align, especially when you're developing communications for folks who are located all over the country. So, Lorraine and Mary, I know some of these challenges sound familiar to you. Would you mind sharing what your experience was like and what you faced when SLB really started to think how do we communicate best with our people?

Mary: Yeah. Cassandra, I'll take that one. I think with any change, there's always challenges. We know we always try to plan. We have a plan A, a plan B, sometimes even C, but sometimes challenges are unexpected too. You mentioned quite a few on the previous slide, some of which we accounted for by really being in tune with our organization and our targeted audiences. For example, one of our main challenges was our dynamic workforce.

These employees that we have across the states, they get their information in many different ways and not only getting the information in different ways, but for the 401K specifically, there were varying levels of understanding about the plan itself. So, we knew we had to have multiple channels to reach these folks and really cover the information in a way that was understandable.

Cassandra: Yeah, I remember that there were so many challenges to address, but also so many channels to use to address those challenges. For the 401K, I think we use video, talking points, email, decision support tool. Am I missing any channels?

Mary: Yeah, actually two I can think of. We really leveraged our HR population as well to help drive the messaging. So, don't forget your HR folks because they could be integral in this process. I think one of the best things we did, pieces of collateral we created was the 401K Info Guide. This was a very illustrated document that covered everything the employees needed to know and everything they should do, how to answer questions, et cetera. We distributed this by email and also hosted it on our employee benefits portal.

What was so great about this is the benefits portal is something that every single employee has access to, whether they're on a company computer or not. We created a very catchy banner on the homepage and that banner opened the info guide. So, it was a super quick way to get people to the information they needed right away about that change. The other exciting thing about that is while they were there, that's also the place they needed to take action. So, incorporating our benefits portal in conjunction with this info guide was a very successful tool

Cassandra: Yeah. That was so successful, Mary, and just a great way to make sure everybody had a single source of truth to access the information regarding this change. So, definitely lots of channels. I also think we did a little bit of audience targeting here that we might want to talk a little bit about. We came up with four target groups for the decision support tool, and that guided a lot of the messaging, right?

Mary: Yeah, I think we're probably all learning there's a lot of different behavior around financial wellness and retirement readiness. We wanted to use this decision support tool to help guide employees to help them make the best decision for themselves and their savings. So, the tool was delivered by email and employees would open the tool, answer a few simple questions, and then they get a recommendation for their contribution, what they might contribute based on their personal situation. We had four identified target areas. The first one, probably easy to imagine, is those folks living paycheck to paycheck who don't believe they're able to afford contributions at all.

Then the second group was those folks who contribute some but not hitting the match yet. The second group, sorry, they could contribute some but they weren't contributing. The third group was they were contributing but not maxing their contributions. Finally, those folks lucky enough to max out their contributions. So, depending on the category they were in, the tool would provide different recommendations. If they used the tool by a certain date and entered their email address, they'd be entered to win a prize. So, just the tip for me is it never hurts to incentivize some of these campaigns that really creates some excitement with the employees. I think the last thing I'd mention here is that any challenge that you face, you just still have to keep the goal in front of you at all times.

The goal for us was to create that engagement, one that would lead to a behavioral shift around this type of savings for our people over time. I think the decision support tool incentive allowed us to achieve this engagement, got people talking, helped them learn what they needed to do to enhance their financial well-being. We know that continuing to promote a tool like this will be able to increase education and understanding to get that shift over time, and we're actually already seeing that shift.

Cassandra: Yeah, thanks, Mary. I know it gets complicated with those four different groups too, right? The ones who can afford to contribute, I think, is the first group, and then those who they can afford to, maybe it's not the full match, but they're just not doing it yet. They don't know really how, and that's a big differentiator. Those are an important distinction there because I think SLB really answered a lot of concerns with the actual 401K changes, but understanding who's who in those two groups especially was really, really important. Thanks, Mary. Gabby, I'm going to turn it over to you.

Gabby: Awesome. Thanks, Cassandra, and thanks, Mary, for that dialogue. It was really helpful. So, let's talk now about using your strategy to align with your organization's priorities. So, we've talked a lot about starting your strategy around your why, but we haven't talked about using your why to build your key messages to communicate with your people. So, if you haven't seen Simon Sinek's Start With Why TED Talk, I really recommend it. In this TED Talk, he communicates that most organizations and departments know what they do and how they do it, but few truly understand why they do it. As a result of this in their communications, they start with what and how but they rarely ever get to why.

The distinction with inspirational organizations and leaders is that they always start with why and then work their way from the inside out when communicating, as you can see here on screen. So, SLB's why are their people. When it came to communicating about the 401K enhancements specifically, our key messages started with why we're making this change.

Not only because employees asked for it as we learned through the survey that Mary and Lorraine solicited, but because SLB really cares about them and supports them and their family members for the long run, not just while they're working at SLB, but after they're done working at SLB too and in their years in retirement. Then we got to how employees could take action and what it meant for them if they did take action. A key component in communicating our why to employees was making our communications as fun and engaging as possible. So, with that, Cassandra, I'll turn it over to you to talk us through the creative process.

Cassandra: Thanks, Gabby. So, this is really fun. How often do you really get to have fun doing things at work? The creative process is one of my favorite parts of the communications process, and you'll see this slide here is just fun already, right? So you know what you're doing and you know what you want to say and maybe how your messaging is going to sound and how you're going to make an impact, but you're thinking, "How am I going to capture people's attention in a real way? What are you going to say? And most importantly, what are you going to wear? How are your communications going to be designed?" So when communicating what matters to your employees and stakeholders, how you show up and share this information really, really matters.

Part of our creative process involves creating an identity for any communications that are deployed. An identity can be either big or small. It can be as focused as a single campaign or it can be as broad as your entire benefits outreach. It really depends on your needs. What you're seeing here on this slide represents some of how SLB described themselves. When you imagine what goes into creating a benefits identity, you might not think about dogs, cars, and Hawaiian shirts, but we really do and that's part of our secret sauce of creating relatable and engaging communications. We want to understand who you are to your people, but also who you want to be seen as.

We get into that by using common animals, locations, and items to better understand the perception of your company now versus how you want to be perceived. Sometimes these are really aligned and then other times there's work to do. So, Lorraine and Mary, when we set out to create an identity, we asked you a series of questions and you had a clear vision of what you wanted your benefits to be. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Mary: Yeah, I'll jump in first. I think this was really one of our favorite parts of our work together. We shared with our broader team just to get all the different input from different roles and personalities. But as part of this exercise, Segal Benz asked us questions like, "If your benefits could be any car or animal, what would you say?" We really did put a lot of thought into this and we said, "We'd be a Toyota because they're sturdy, they last a long time, and they're mid-market competitive." We also said that we'd really like us to aspire to be a Lexus. Who doesn't want to be a Lexus and who doesn't want to be aspirational in the market? For an animal, we noted that we wanted to be a Golden Retriever because they're smart.

I mean, first of all, if you ignore the chewing on the shoes part, they're smart, steady, and loyal. But at that time we did this exercise, we really may have been a little bit more like a German Shepherd, not as approachable. We had a pretty formal approach to communications, paternalistic type of approach to benefits in general and how we communicated about our benefits. So, this really was a fun exercise to get us thinking about we were at a point in time where we could really make some changes and some shifts in what we were doing. I think this exercise helped us get there in a very relevant way.

Lorraine: I couldn't agree more, Mary. It was a really fun exercise. We've had a way of communicating about our benefits in the past, but we had the opportunity to make some changes and we wanted a visual identity for our benefits. So, with the Meet Your Match campaign, we decided to make a splash and communicate to our people in the way that has never been done before. Gabby and Cassandra, during this process, you asked us, "What would make our work together more successful?", and we said, "A way to differentiate our benefits communications from other company communications."

Cassandra: Yeah, that's right. A visual identity that employees can see and know it's related to their benefits.

Lorraine: Yes, and we wanted to align that visual identity to SLB's mission and operating values. So, this way, we can make a clear connection and communicate to our people we are making a continuous investment in them. The creative process for the Meet Your Match communications provided the opportunity to strengthen the relationship with our people.

Cassandra: Thanks, Lorraine and Mary. So, let's talk about how we got there. We started with conducting a survey, building your strategy and key messages, designing your benefits communications identity, all these things, no small feat. For benefits communications with SLB, we chose that very worthy topic to unveil all of your creative efforts, which was initially the Big Health Energy campaign that came right before the 401K announcements. That was really fun. We used that paired with SLB's larger rebrand, and we'll discuss that in a moment to re-introduce SLB's benefits to their people. Because this brand became so well recognized, we applied it to your match communications, which were also a huge success. Gabby, I think you're going to walk us through that journey step by step.

Gabby: Yup, absolutely. Thanks, Cassandra. What's working on a visual identity without a little curveball, right? So at the start of our visual identity process, SLB was actually Schlumberger and this was their brand.

Mary: Yeah. Gabby, if I remember correctly, during this timeframe, when we were first starting our creative process, we had an inkling internally that there was going to be a small change to the brand. At that time, we thought, "Yeah, probably it's just going to be a tweak to the blue, the Schlumberger blue color, amp it up a little bit or something." But it turns out that the change was a little bit bigger than we anticipated.

Gabby: Just slightly, Mary.

Mary: Yeah. So, probably about exactly midway through the creative process, Schlumberger went through a global major organizational rebrand. So, it was a little bit more than just a change in a color. We not only changed the organization's name from Schlumberger to SLB. Think about that. I'm sure some of you have been through it, but changing your name on every single document. But we also changed the entire look, feel, and even the tone of our brand. It's actually very, very exciting, but also very interesting timing.

It was definitely a hurdle, but the silver lining was it made the perfect opportunity for us to launch these new campaigns, this new identity we were working on with a great new splash, vibrant new colors, fonts, I said also a much more modern look, tone, and feel. While they made it look fairly easy, I do want to call out that Segal Benz was able to accommodate this big shift. Talk about being nimble and being able to pivot, this was a true example of that. They made it look easy, but I know there was extra hours to accommodate. Gave us all a few extra gray hairs for sure.

Gabby: Thanks, Mary. So, I just wanted to show everyone what the initial outcome of our visual identity process was. So, as Cassandra mentioned, our first campaign was Big Health Energy. As Cassandra mentioned at the start of our presentation here today, in our initial strategy conversations with SLB, we learned that in addition to their organizational purpose of creating access to energy for the benefit of all, their people are really full of unique energy. We really want to bring that energy to life through our communications. This meant that our look and feel needed to be as powerful and as bold as SLB's people.

Ron: That's a great opportunity at a time when the corporate rebranding is happening to rebrand your benefits and other HR communications at the same time. That's great work and a great opportunity. So, you were able to create this Big Health Energy visual identity in the midst of the Schlumberger rebranding to SLB. Was anything else going on at the same time?

Mary: Yeah, Ron, I guess the simple answer is yes. There seems like in any big company, there's always things going on at SLB. Fortunately or unfortunately, I guess the rebrand happened right in the middle of our annual enrollment. Anybody cringing out there? I know I cringed a few times with this, but in a perfect world, this would've also been a great time for us to launch the new brand with our annual enrollment communications.

But as you guys all know, we were way down the road on our deliverables and everything else for annual enrollment, but again, it did create a wonderful opportunity to do a real standalone launch of the identity and the campaign with the new brand. So, all's well that ends well and we were very excited to have had the new brand. Thanks, Ron.

Ron: I just want to add, it shows a great alignment with the HR work or the benefits work and the corporate strategy. So, congratulations on taking advantage of that.

Mary: Thanks so much.

Gabby: Thanks, Mary. So, I just want to take a step back. I know that I noted that we started our visual identity process with Big Health Energy first, and we really built on this sentiment and look and feel to create the Meet Your Match communications that you can see here on screen, which were used to announce the 401K enhancements. The communications are really fun and energized. They used a perfect balance of SLB's new primary color palette, the SLB blue and teal, and their secondary color palette as well. They also used simple language and clear call to action, so employees knew exactly what they needed to do and how they needed to do it.

Lorraine: Hey, Gabby, the bottom line for the 401K campaign really needed to be big and bold. We made significant enhancements to our plan and we wanted to be sure our employees were aware of the change and appreciated the value. So, Segal Benz helped us message this change in a way that really highlighted our enhancements, and visually, it was an amazing campaign that was well received by our employee population.

Cassandra: Thanks, Lorraine. Now, let's talk about how we actually executed these communications through your broader strategy. The first step in executing any strategy is setting the baseline. You can do this by determining which deliverables are needed for your campaign and how they should be integrated to best reach the population you're hoping to target. With SLB, we started this by creating an annual roadmap. This roadmap outlined the deliverables, target audience, key messages, designated a deploy date for each piece, when it would arrive in employee's hands, and who was actually sending the communication. Was it SLB? Was it Segal Benz? Was it another vendor partner? We aligned this with SLB's broader communications plan for the year.

This allowed us to see all of the communications at a glance and determine when the best time would be to communicate because you don't want to send 10 messages on the same day. You want to make sure that people can actually digest the information you're giving to them when you're giving it to them. From here, we were able to identify which populations were missing or which populations might need more communication depending on their worker status or the action we wanted them to take. Part of this setting the baseline, creating the strategy, the roadmap is data. Data is so critical.

So, for the 401K match specifically, we benchmarked our starting point before any communications were released, and this included what people were currently contributing to their 401K plans or what they weren't contributing. Once our roadmap and benchmarking process was complete, we executed the communication through a targeted outreach process. So, here's another high level example of our Meet Your Match communications. This is not all of them, but as you can see, we created communications for several different channels and populations, including the employee infographic guide that Mary mentioned earlier, which was released by email and then housed on SLB's intranet site.

We did an employee hype video, which you can see right there with that cute little piggy bank, which was released in a nationwide announcement email. Then we also did call center and HR and manager talking points because we want to make sure your messaging and everything that you're sending out is supported by those who are going to be frontline assistants for folks when they have questions, as well as an interactive tool that would help not only educate employees about their matching enhancement, but also help them make a decision for their unique personal situation. Gabby-

Gabby: Yeah, that's a great point, Cassandra. I think one thing that we'd like to call out is that pushing one communication campaign won't change how people interact with your benefits over the long term. It's really mission critical to keep talking through your people to drive them to action and to really reach that long-term behavioral change. I think our roadmap really helped us identify how we could make this long-term change possible throughout the year by constantly communicating.

Ron: Hey, speaking of the roadmap, you have a lot of employee benefit vendors out there. How did you integrate your vendor communications through this process?

Gabby: Yeah, thanks, Ron. That's a great question. SLB does have a lot of vendors. So, Mary, I'll turn it over to you to talk a little bit more about that.

Ron: You're muted again, Mary.

Mary: Well, you all just missed something really exciting that I said. So, I guess I'll say it over again. But yeah, we definitely use this roadmap to track our vendor communications. We knew we wanted to come out front from communications from US benefits to introduce any of these changes, any of the communications, to let employees know what was coming down the pike. If they were getting communications from a vendor, they would know why. I wouldn't think it was phishing or something like that. So, the roadmap was integral in this process. So, we worked with our vendors. We found out what communication strategies they had, they wanted to pursue for engagement, and we determined what communications we knew that US benefits had to send.

We just worked on a very detailed calendar, cascaded those communications. Because as I think Cassandra mentioned earlier, you don't want employees to get 10 messages on every day. We want to ensure that it's a reasonable cascade, the messaging is consistent, and it's all supporting the effort of the campaign and the ultimate goal. So, I think the roadmap really helped us to accomplish that, and we could always refer back to that to check dates and it worked really well. So, for the Meet Your Match campaign specifically, this worked very well with the general messages from US benefits, followed by targeted messages from our 401K record keeper.

Gabby: Thanks, Mary. So, as we mentioned many times throughout the duration of this presentation here today, evaluating the success of communications is really critical. You can do this by measuring program participation and outcomes and then refining your strategic plan to reflect key lessons learned. So, with that, Lorraine, would you be able to walk us through the key learnings from the Meet Your Match campaign?

Lorraine: Yes, Gabby. Through the Meet Your Match campaign, we were able to ensure 100% employees were saving for retirement, even if the only contribution was a 2% SLB was making. The second thing was to increase the average contribution for those who made changes during the campaign. So, before the campaign, the average contribution was 6.54%, and after the campaign, the average contribution was now 10.64%. 15% of our US population updated their contributions to increase their match, and they increased their contributions by 63%. So, the numbers don't lie. This campaign was a huge success and a big step forward for our employees retirement readiness. It's also been really impactful on to SLB's recruiting and retention efforts too.

Cassandra: Yeah, thanks, Lorraine. There's no doubt that the Meet Your Match campaign was a huge success. Those numbers really don't lie, but it was such a success that it landed SLB a first place Eddy Award from Pensions and Investments as well. So, that was really great. We want to thank you both so much, Lorraine and Mary, for your amazing partnership, and it was a huge undertaking that the team took to get to this point. While we only highlighted the Meet Your Match campaign today, there was so much more that went into getting us where we are now, and we really want to acknowledge all the amazing things that the US benefits team has accomplished in the last year.

Lorraine: Thanks, Cassandra. We really feel the same way too. Working together on these campaigns over the last two years has really elevated our communications. Not only do we make great changes to our benefits, but we also increase the engagement with the benefits amongst our employee population. It's a really exciting time for our people and our benefits at SLB, and that's really what it's all about.

Gabby: I couldn't agree more, Lorraine. It really is what it's all about. Before we turn it over to the audience to open it up for Q&A, we just want to end the presentation with a few key takeaways. So, all in all, to create a solid base for your benefits communications, your starting points can include, first and foremost, listening to your employees and gathering your data points. As we learned from SLB's story, they did this by soliciting an employee survey first. The next step you can take is creating a well-developed strategy, inclusive of a detailed roadmap for ongoing outreach throughout the year.

Lastly, you can really tie in your strategy to your communications by creating a strong visual identity that really outlines your purpose and your goals. These three things together create a consistent, engaging experience, one that employees can really depend on. They know that when they see a benefits communication, it's something important and relevant to them and that they should pay attention to. With that, it brings us to the conclusion of our presentation. So, Ron, I think we'll open it up for Q&A.

Ron: Great. Good job, you guys. I'll just remind the audience if you've got a question, you can write it into the Q&A section. We'll look for that. We do have one that's come up already. SLB has US employees all over the world and sometimes in really challenging conditions. One of the questions is, how did you reach the hard-to-reach employees? Sometimes in some companies, I don't know if it's SLB, but it could be people in a manufacturing line or it could be people who otherwise don't have access to corporate computers or what have you. So, how did you get to these hard-to-reach people?

Cassandra: Lorraine, I don't know if you want to take a stab at that question, but from my experience, I can share with a lot of clients in this situation, those hard-to-reach employees are hard to reach, but they're not impossible to reach. So, a couple ways that we might get around the lack of computer access or the remote location is by educating people who do have computer access, who are going to be there with them. So, that HRBP manager training, call center training, super important to help people be aware of what's needed. There's also old-school print materials, flyers, those types of things that can be used, lanyards in manufacturing space. A lot of different ideas. Gabby, I know you have experience with this with some of your clients as well.

Gabby: Yup, absolutely. Mary, is there anything you'd like to add to that?

Mary: I think I'll just tag along with Cassandra there too. I think it's remembering your HR partners is really important, leveraging some of their internal channels that they may have. They might have some internal newsletters or meetings where things can be brought to employees' attention. I know snail mail is a dirty word, but if it's really important, especially for us on things like annual enrollment or critical issues, and if we want to make sure that spouses are aware of what's going on as well, we do still use some snail mail for that.

Another thing that's been very successful is if they're in... I think you mentioned a manufacturing environment or something like that where you can use posters or retractable banners, things that you can get on site for employees to read again. Like Cassandra said, those printable take away things. There's magnets, things that have a little bit of shelf life. As she said, it's difficult but not impossible. You just have to try it a little harder.

Cassandra: Yeah. Another one that regularly comes up too is table tents in the break or lunchroom area. Those can be popular. You can use QR codes with those types of materials. There's definitely ways to reach those hard-to-reach folks. You just got to be a little bit more creative. I think, Ron, I saw another question, not in the Q&A. Mary, they're curious what prize was offered as an incentive for the decision support tool?

Mary: Oh, for the decision support tool, we offered... It was called a Ridge Wallet. It's a new age wallet that's very slim and almost indestructible. Lorraine, you can correct me if I'm wrong, probably about an 80% male employee population. But the wallet came in all kinds of colors and fun things. Really for our folks, they love games and it doesn't really matter what it is. Even when we do our virtual benefits fair, we do some pretty innocuous prizes for that. They'll jump on board. So, it doesn't have to be anything too exciting. But for the decision support tool, it was a Ridge Wallet, you should look them up. They're pretty cool

Lorraine: I think they're on Prime today, guys, just so you know.

Mary: On sale.

Gabby: I just want to add that not only did you offer one Ridge Wallet, you actually offered 25 Ridge Wallets.

Mary: That's correct. Want them to know they have a chance at winning something. Truly, even when we've done things where it's just one person, they like it. I guess it makes the day go by a little quicker if you have something to play with. So, it's good.

Ron: Some of these communication strategies that you're talking about costs money. When I think about the increased contribution on a 401K of 4%, all that's not insignificant to the company. How did you get the business case agreed to and how did you build that business case for the company to make all these investments? So that just on a 401K alone, they could enhance it so much.

Cassandra: So I'll let Lorraine jump in if Lorraine wants to, but I'll just say that part of our work together and strategic thought with Segal Benz and any of our client partners, we really do make a strong business case for our clients to get the resources they need to make sure that their communications can happen. It doesn't matter what the plan is that you implement and how great it is. If nobody's heard of it, nobody's going to use it. So, we're able to really connect the dots there and help our clients secure those budgets that they need. We also are happy to work with their carriers with credits and other things. So, we will help find or make room in the budget, so to speak, whenever possible. Lorraine, is there anything you wanted to add to that?

Lorraine: I mean, Ron, you want our secret sauce, don't you, right? Our secret formula. I mean, I don't think there's a secret formula. It's basically understanding our environment, the leadership focus at the time, and what we can do to partner with our partners. So, it's a lot of those factors we have to take in consideration and they change all the time. So, with the 401K plan, it was the right time, the right opportunity, and with a great support from our executive team. As we can see the results, it was a great investment by the company.

Ron: Congratulations on that. A lot of companies are challenged with making those business cases and/or just getting the company to make more investments in the benefits package. So, you guys did great. A couple questions have come up. Just a quick one, what's your US employee population?

Lorraine: Our head count, it's over 15,000.

Ron: Fifteen thousand, okay. There was another question on the wallet. What tool did you use to decide who the winners were on the wallet?

Gabby: Yeah, I can-

So, on our digital support tool, after employees finished the tool, there was an entry form that they could enter their email address into. That then populated into a spreadsheet that Segal Benz had access to. Then we basically used one of those random generators to pick 25 winners.

Cassandra: I think the question too was a little bit about the decision support tool itself and it's custom to each of our clients. If you're interested in learning more or seeing a demo of something like that, definitely reach out to Gabby or myself and we can show you how that works and a few examples.

Ron: All right. We have just a minute or two left. There's a follow-up question on if you could share a little bit more about the roadmap.

Cassandra: I mean, there's so much to share about the roadmap. I'm wondering specifically what you're thinking with that question. I could say the roadmap is all-inclusive of everything that's going on communications-wise. So, it's not just what SLB was considering communicating for the year. It's okay, SLB is going to communicate this. This vendor is also communicating, vendor A, vendor B, vendor C through Z, right? They're all doing these communications. Segal Benz is going to help us with this. What is happening? Getting your arms around that full picture of communications while also layering strategy there. So, it's a roadmap.

It means you want to get to a certain place. What are your goals for that year? What do you need to communicate? When does it make the most sense to communicate? All of that goes into that roadmap process, and it really is a process. It seems so simple, right? Put everything in one place and see what you're communicating. But it's a lot and it takes a lot of thought, effort, and updating. Gabby and Mary, I think we're on version 32 of the roadmap at this point.

Mary Von: Thirty-two A, I think.

Ron: Thirty-two Z.

Gabby: Yup, we update it very frequently.

Cassandra: Yeah. It's a living document. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely not a one-time exercise. It's definitely something that benefits from being accessed and updated frequently.

Ron: All right. Perhaps the last question, do you have a name for the decision support tool?

Cassandra: Yeah. As I mentioned before, it's something that we build in-house. So, the name can be anything that you want it to be. It's named according to your needs and your thoughts, theme, all that stuff.

Ron: Okay, fantastic.

Cassandra: I know we have a few minutes, Ron. I don't know if we want to wait and see if anybody else has a question.

Ron: Well, we can pause for just a second, I think, and see if anybody else wants to raise any other questions. If not, we'll get to the wrap up. I'm not seeing any more coming through. So, if you want to let us know how to get in touch with you guys, that's great. Cassandra?

Cassandra: Yeah, here's our info right here. If you forget, you can look us up on LinkedIn and we'll be responsive there as well. But our emails are here if you want to take a screenshot. You can reach out to either myself or Gabby and be happy to talk more about any of your questions, show you any examples, talk more about what you've seen here or what your needs are. Happy to have a conversation anytime. No question is too small. Thank you.

Gabby: Thanks, Cassandra. Also, just wanted to give another big thank you to Mary and Lorraine for taking this time to tell their fabulous story with us today.

Lorraine: Yeah, thank you.

Ron: Yeah, and I want to say congratulations again to you guys for such a successful campaign. Congrats on the Eddy Award. That was extra cool too. All of that in the midst of managing open enrollment, I cannot imagine how you pulled that off, but well done. Thank you for sharing all this with us. If you enjoyed today's program, please visit The Conference Board's website for a full roster of upcoming webcasts. With that, I want, again, thank Cassandra, Gabby, Lorraine, and Mary. It was a great presentation, great message, great delivery. If you enjoyed today's program, please visit the Conference Board's website for full roster. Oh, I already said that. Okay. I think that's it. That's a wrap for the day. Thank you everybody for joining us, and I hope you have a great day.

Mary: Thank you, guys.

Cassandra: Thank you, Ron. Thank you, everyone.

Lorraine: Thank you.