Communicate your employee benefits on a shoe string

Amba

Jess Payne from our employee communications team offers some great tips for broadcasting your employee benefits.

Offering excellent employee benefits is increasingly important to businesses’ wellbeing and retention strategies – but if employees don’t know what’s on offer, they’ll never be able to see the value of your benefits or reap the rewards.

Contrary to popular belief, letting employees know about their benefits doesn’t have to be difficult and can be done cheaply!

Here’s what you need to ask to get started on a shoe string.

  1. What do you want to achieve through your benefits scheme?

Go back to basics and have a look at why you put in your benefit scheme in the first place. Once you’ve redefined what your scheme is there to achieve, you can think about how to measure whether it’s working or not – whether that’s through your general sense of how it’s going or preferably through measured objectives you can quantify through line manager feedback or a survey.

It’ll be much easier to assess whether your new communication efforts are working once you know what you’re trying to achieve and where you are currently. It’ll also give you a benchmark to continue measuring the success of your communications going forwards.

  1. What different ways could you communicate?

The next step is to audit your channels, so make a list of the different ways of communicating with employees at your organisation. These can include:

  • Email
  • Intranet
  • Notice boards
  • Communal areas
  • Screens around the business
  • Payslips
  • Posters
  • Letters
  • Leaflets/ booklets
  • Team meetings
  • Webinars
  • Videos
  • …and don’t forget your HR processes!

Top tip:

Making your benefits scheme an integral part of your HR processes will mean that benefits stay top of mind for longer. Employees will join the company, have annual reviews, 1 to 1s and life events at different times and if they’re told about their benefits at each stage it can keep word of mouth going in the office for much of the year!

  1. What works best for your employees?

Once you’ve got a list of the ways you can communicate have a think about which channels work best for your employees. For example, if your workforce is out and about most of the day, or work on a factory or shop floor, email may not work as well for them as it would for a company whose employees are desk based.

Or, if you’re spread over lots of different sites a webinar could work well. Don’t forget, lots of webinar providers now have the option to record your webinar and save it as a video, so by hosting just one recorded webinar you could also end up with a benefits video to share!

  1. What help can you get?

Reaching the doing stage can be daunting, so remember you don’t have to go it alone.

Lots of benefits providers have their own promotional materials they’ll be happy to share with you – all you have to do is ask. These can include wording for emails or intranet articles, posters, printed leaflets and booklets and even special deals or free trials!

Internally, make the most of your colleague’s skills. See if your marketing team have any time to help with getting the word out there. Getting help from other teams will be easier if you can explain to them why communicating internally about benefits is important to the business.

Don’t forget you can also train benefit champions and make sure your line managers are spreading the word too! This will help to make benefits a part of your company culture and share the responsibility of spreading the message.

  1. Make a plan

Once you’ve got an idea of what content is available from your benefit providers and how much help your colleagues can offer you can start to plan out when to communicate.

When you’re putting your plan together think about:

  • Who the communication’s for? Are you trying to contact everyone or is your message for a smaller segment of employees?
  • When’s the best time to let people know about each particular benefit? For example, promoting Cycle to Work will be more effective in May than November because the weather’s nicer for bike rides. Or you could tie in a promotion about your Employee Assistance Programme with a wellbeing session or mental health awareness week for extra impact.
  • What channels are you going to use? Are you going to send a one-off email, or would an email, poster and intranet article have more of an impact for what you’re trying to achieve?

Once you’ve had a think about the best times and channels for spreading the word make a plan so you can get ready in advance and make sure you’re not sending too many messages all at once.

Making sure your employees know about their benefit scheme is as important as having a benefit scheme in place – and communicating to your employees can be simple and cheap.

If you’re still daunted by the prospect, or simply don’t have the time or expertise to do what you’d like to, we can help you to build a business case for outsourcing your benefits communications to make sure your employees know about the great benefits you have on offer.

About Amba

Delivering a great employee experience is a challenge for growing organisations. At Amba, it’s what we do. Our online employee benefits platform, HR support and workplace wellbeing services bring out the best in your employees – enabling your business to thrive.

Call us on 01454 808658.