Group Benefits are a key part of compensation packages for many reasons. They can be used to bring in top talent, retain your amazing team, create a wellness culture, the list goes on.

However, that breaks down if your team doesn’t know what their benefits are or how to use them. Benefits are compensation and should be communicated as clearly as you would salary or vacation days.

Does the cat get your tongue every time you want to talk benefits? No worries, we’re here to untangle some tricks to effective communication!

First things first, the reasoning

According to the 2023 Benefits Canada Healthcare Survey, “Plan Members who understand their plan extremely or very well (83%) were much more likely to describe the plan as excellent or good than those who do not understand their plan (57%)”.

From the same survey, “74% of members who understand their plan extremely or very well said it meets their needs extremely or very well, compared to 47% among those who somewhat understand and 38% among those who do not understand their plan”.

Why is this important?

Well, if you’re investing money into something for your team, you’ll want them to understand and appreciate it, right?

Look at this from a retention perspective. When benefits are well understood, they’re more highly valued. When your team values their compensation (including benefits), they’ll stick around.

To sum things up: ensuring benefits are understood can increase the perceived value of your plan, driving up happiness and loyalty, and justifying your investments.

Let's get into the meat and potatoes

Now that you know you should invest your time into properly communicating, let's get into the how.

Set goals for your employee benefits communication

This is synonymous with other parts of running a business as almost every aspect of a company starts with setting goals.

What do you want your team to know, feel, and do when it comes to their benefits plan?

Once you get that answer, it's time to figure out ways to achieve them (that’ll be in the next section). By creating a concise communications roadmap, you can keep track of what your team knows, any areas that need more attention, and will help you structure future communications (it’s an ongoing process).

Make the benefits information easily available

This is a huge part of your communications foundation. As we all know, company-wide memos can get lost after enough time has passed. If your team can’t access the ins and outs of their benefits package easily, chances are, they may just not use it.

Luckily, things aren’t sent by fax anymore. By using a digital platform, provided by your benefits provider or in-house, your team can easily access, search, and discover their benefits in an extremely effective way.

But more importantly, providing all benefits-related resources and support online, ensures further knowledge transfer to plan members. A benefits booklet is typically the industry standard, but it's an archaic way of going about communication. What typically happens is your plan members will scan through the booklet, throw it on a shelf, and forget about it.

By providing easily accessible, fully digital resources and support, any questions your team has can be answered within a couple of clicks.

Have a communication plan for important messaging

This is important for many reasons. Firstly, it establishes an ongoing conversation with your team, normalizing talking about benefits. Second, it allows you to remind your team of what they have available to them during periods when they may need it most.

What do we mean by this?

Let’s use an Employee and Family Assistance Plan (EFAP) for example. An EFAP provides 24/7 support and resources for many challenges such as depression, anxiety, financial, legal, the list goes on.

During the winter months when most people are indoors and the weather is typically gloomy, sending communications about mental health resources offered by an EFAP can entice team members to use the benefit and confidently navigate potential pitfalls.

Constant communication keeps benefits top of mind and encourages your team to use and understand them.

Stay flexible and listen!

When discussing a group benefits plan, it’s a two-way street. The plan should be molded in the best interests of your team. If they don’t understand it or don’t think it’s meeting their needs, they should be able to bring that up.

It’s extremely important that you:

1. Listen to your team – the plan is molded around them so if their needs change you should know!
2. Stay flexible and ask questions – people change, and their needs change with them. This may mean you need to consider a different plan design. Make sure you ask questions to properly move forward.
3. Don’t be afraid to change – As team members and business needs change, you need to change with them! Don’t be afraid to shake things up to fit the new needs.

This kind of open-door policy allows for mutual understanding and can better the plan moving forward. Ensuring needs are consistently being met is imperative to establishing and maintaining a great benefits plan.

The aftermath

Properly communicating about your benefits increases Plan Member understanding, which likely increases usage. If that worries you, then your plan may not be as good as you think. Premium-based plans aren’t built to endure increased usage, that’s why our contribution-based plans can stand the test of time.

High usage is a plan breaker when you have a premium-based plan (the kind you see from the typical big insurance companies). Higher usage means higher premiums and higher premiums mean higher costs for your business. This is why we typically don’t see proper communication with these plans.

“Well, my employees already pay into their benefits, so higher usage doesn’t bother me.”

If that's a thought that popped into your head, look at our blog about the downfalls of a co-paying solution.

What you really need is a solution that controls your costs while offering ultimate flexibility to meet your diverse team’s needs. What you need is a Health Spending Account (HSA).

An HSA doesn’t have premiums, so if your team increases their usage, your pockets won’t take the hit. An HSA is also an easy-to-understand solution (which makes this whole business of communication simpler for you).

Getting fired up about benefits? Give our Growth Team a call and we’ll get you fitted!

Group Benefits make my head spin

Don’t worry, it’s a common side effect when faced with boatloads of information. Luckily, we’re in the business of keeping things simple. Look at our Resource Centre for some easy-to-understand benefits quick hits. We’re also social, find us on Twitter (X), Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram for some great content!

Ready to better your business? Get in touch with our fantastic Growth Team to guide you through your benefits journey.