Tips for communicating employee benefits

Before you start sharing information about wellness offerings, consider asking employees what they’d like to learn more about. Are they curious about mindfulness offerings, or are they interested in more financial education? This can guide your work and help you avoid wasted effort.

From there, use the feedback to iterate on and continuously improve your program. At Uber, we’re enriching ongoing programming based on feedback. “As time goes on, we will refine the program to include other requested topics, such as spirituality and family,” Drayton says.

You can use many different communication methods to share information about your benefits program. Wherever you choose to include these details, from onboarding to events and beyond, engage in conversations often.

“We’re using multifaceted ways to highlight what we’re doing, from email and hashtags to Slack channels dedicated to wellness and the campaign,” Drayton says. This keeps the available benefits top of mind for everyone on your team.

Your program should also include manager-specific education. Since managers often have regular contact with employees and a deeper understanding of their performance, their assistance is key to making sure employees know about and use benefits.

Try creating a manager-specific session to help them understand how wellness offerings can benefit their teams and when to suggest specific benefits. This training could also include guidance for wellness suggestions during the feedback cycle, to ensure that team members feel supported throughout the year.

Invite external representatives or experts from your benefits providers to meet with employees. Many benefits vendors will provide a representative or expert to speak to your organization or engage with your group in some way. This might be a doctor, wellness expert, therapist, or someone else.

Their outside knowledge can enhance your education efforts. Empower these experts to highlight and explain the value of what you offer. This can provide more context and give your employees a better understanding of how to use benefits.

Go beyond the standard communications to pique interest in health and well-being. When you host events that employees can participate in, you may increase the chances that they’ll use the resources.

This could include not only a panel or wellness webinar but also an in-person cooking class for a local team or a global meditation session. Every team is different, so experiment to see what wellness topics and formats resonate best with yours.

“When you talk about well-being, it’s different to different people,” Drayton says. If your team is global, be sensitive to what their regional or cultural definitions of wellness mean and what they’re looking for when it comes to benefits.

Employees will likely be grateful to learn more about their benefits and will see how the organization cares for them. “‘Love’ is an action word,” Drayton says. “By walking the walk, it makes me carry my head up high.”