At Ovation Incentives we understand exactly how important it is to make communicating employee benefits clear in a way that’ll inform, please, and delight your people.
Your employees are everything. Without them, you don’t have a business. Just a room full of desks or a factory full of equipment. Keeping your employees happy is one thing. Communicating the things that you’re doing to make them happy is another. You can put all the benefits and rewards in the world in place but when you don’t communicate them clearly and well, you lose out.
Top quality employee benefits communications matter. Read on to find out all about the many benefits of employee communication, how to do it confidently, effectively, and in a way that inspires. By the end of this article, you’ll know all about the benefits of good employee communication, and you’ll have enough insight to be able to make an essential employee benefits communication plan. We’ll even provide some handy employee benefit communication ideas.
Importance of Effective Employee Benefits Communication
It’s just as crucial as marketing your wares to prospects and customers. Communicating employee benefits clearly comes with many real business benefits. For a start, everyone understands your good intentions. They understand exactly what your employee benefits scheme means to them. Good employee communications in general encourages staff engagement. It drives better staff performance and plays a large part in employee experience, which in turn means your customers also enjoy an excellent experience with your business.
Communicating clearly and well means your people are more likely to stick around, simply because they feel cared for, respected, and included. And it promotes wellbeing in the workplace as well. Clarity is always easier to handle than confusion!
The benefits of employee communication come to the fore when new and current employees are entirely unaware of the employee benefits programmes set up to inspire and motivate them. It might sound odd, but it happens. When people don’t know what they can gain from them, they simply don’t make use of them, and that means wasted time, effort, and energy.
In our post covid lockdown world, more of us than ever are working from home and working remotely. Many new businesses have been set up on a remote team basis, with no premises. All this highlights the need for organisations to establish clear, inspiring employee benefits communication plans that reveal all to your home-working workforce. The best employee benefits communication plan will make certain everyone is fully aware of what’s available, for whom, why, and how. And that means an effective employee benefits communication should be a key element in every employee engagement strategy.
What is an Employee Benefits Communications Plan?
An employee benefits communications plan is the most effective way to make sure everybody involved understands how it all works. It should also lay out exactly what the plan will achieve. So what are the goals of such a plan?
First, you should make it help employees find out and stay aware of the ongoing employee benefits information they need to take full advantage of the benefits. It should encourage and inspire people to engage with the benefits package, use it, and make the most of it. And that means you need to make the details of the employee benefits package crystal clear.
You’ll want to monitor the uptake of benefits, then be prepared to make changes to the programme in response to staff input. If they don’t perceive something as a benefit, you’ll need to provide an incentive that does. Timely updates to any changes in the package are vital to keep people keen and give them the respect they deserve. All this means choosing the best and most relevant communication channels for the people the plan is targeted to.
How do you know when you’ve got it right? You can establish the impact and effectiveness of your plan using employee feedback surveys.
How to Communicate Your Employee Benefits
The benefits of good employee communication are clear. But how, exactly, do you do it? Think of it like a marketing campaign. You need to give everyone the information they need in a way that’s clear and simple, to account for every ability. That means communicating in plain language and avoiding jargon. You’ll need to ensure the information you provide in the plan is wholly relevant. It’s about saying what they need to hear, not what you want to say.
Personalised language is so much better than the passive voice. Use ‘you’ and ‘your’, ‘we’ and ‘our’ to make people feel they’re involved, that they matter. And you’ll need to provide the information at the right time, then keep it up to date as time passes.
Last but not least, it’s sensible to assess which is the best communication channel to use. Will your workforce respond best to a page on your intranet or a private employee area in your website? Would a printed copy with a smart cover do the job better, or a well-designed notice on a notice board? The best place for you might be inside your employee handbook, there for every employee to see.
Obviously, those working from home have different requirements from those working in the office. Take them into account as well. And think carefully about how the plan will detail the communications channels you’ll be using for communications in future.
Your employee benefit communication ideas can involve everything from a one-to-one session in person when the employee first joins the company, as part of the onboarding process, to frequent updates presented in person to teams and groups by managers and team leaders. You can harness everything from webinars and videos, emails and text messages, company benefits booklets and podcasts to company blogs and news pages, social media channels and specially designed online benefits hubs. You might find you use several ways in tandem, just to make sure everyone in the business gets the knowledge they need, depending on their own personal preferences.
When your people expect an update via the regular quarterly company bulletin, your life is easy. An online benefits hub is a great idea as long as everyone understands how to use it. The best systems can be used to both inform and track benefits to individual staff, and they’re perfect for ticking all the comms boxes when some of your people work remotely or from home.
It’s vital for your managers and team leaders to be open to questions and enquiries from staff around benefits. And it’s really important to make sure your employees know exactly where to go for accurate and up to date employee benefits information.
Now you know how to communicate employee benefits well
Our employee benefit communication ideas and insight should give you everything you need to know to inform everyone about what they’[re eligible for under your worker benefits scheme. Great employee benefits communication can make all the difference between a programme that doesn’t hit the part it needs to hit, and one that hits the parts others can’t!
Would you like to book a demo of our fantastic employee rewards system? It makes life so much easier than trying to do it all bit by bit and join all the dots manually. If you prefer, why not contact us for an inspiring chat with an expert from our team?