How Effective Communication Assists Employee Benefits Changes

Communication with your staff is key when it comes to employee benefits planning and implementing changes to your employee benefits. Proper communication with your staff can mitigate potential onslaughts of complaints and employee dissatisfaction. 

As specialists in employee benefits solutions for corporations, Pacific Prime excels in professional services environments where your workforce can be more demanding than the average. Our expert advisors have ample experience in the industry working with the salaries, perks, and benefits. 

Are you looking to optimize your employee health benefits? Here’re our handy tips for communicating employee benefits changes effectively to ensure a high buy-in from staff and a smooth transition in employee healthcare benefits.

The Benefits of Communication Strategies

Implementing changes to an employee benefit package can be a significant event for employers and employees. Preparing an effective communication strategy can be crucial in ensuring a smooth transition and helping employees understand and accept the changes being made.

Keys for a Successful Employee Benefits Communication Plan

Richard Cushing said “Always plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.” If your company is serious about keeping its head above water should the rains come in, early and thoughtful communications planning will be your ark in the flood.

In order to create an effective communication strategy, there are several key factors you have to keep in mind::

1. Start your plan as soon as you can

According to Koenig’s “Rumor in the Marketplace”, workplace gossip can chip away morale and fuel anxiety, conflicts, and misunderstanding. Getting the right information out early will help stem employee dissatisfaction based on the wrong office talk.

As soon as you know that your company might be considering changes to its employee benefits solutions, start thinking about how you might communicate that early. You’ll be more prepared and confident when delivering the news to staff, and it’ll also help head off any rumor mills that might arise.

2. Think About Who’s in Your Audience

The modern workplace is as diverse as ever; spanning over multiple generations, genders, religions, and cultures. It’s important to remember that these people have different perspectives, values, and views on what they need.

Don’t forget that employees really do want to understand what’s happening with their benefits, but some may be more interested than others. 

3. Plan Your Education Strategy

For some workplaces, one seminar on employee benefits planning changes might suffice. Others might require constant engagement and frequent messages, so those of you who know this is what your business will need should plan accordingly.

This can take the form of periodic change updates, featured spotlights on specific benefits, and employee success stories, distributed via emails or through your work intranet page. Plan to take advantage of your existing communication tools for the best education and engagement results.

4. Stocktake Your Communication Tools and How to Use Them

You know who you’re targeting, and what messages to target them with; but how do you get your communication to them? Take stock of all the channels you have available to you and work them into your communication strategy, such as:

• HR portal
• Mobile device applications
• Email notifications, intranet videos and articles, online satisfaction surveys
• Social media
• Print media

Use the tools available to you to better educate staff on the employee benefits changes you’re making, and maintain engagement as the changes are embedded.

5. Be Honest and Transparent About Changes

Trust plays an instrumental role in all workplaces and can affect the well-being and performance of your employees. Trust comes from employees feeling valued, which leads to higher levels of engagement. 

In the PWC trust survey, 86% of business executives think employee trust is high, compared to 67% of employees who say they highly trust their employer. It is important to keep the ‘trust gap’ in mind when preparing your communication strategy.

Remember that an honest discussion that clearly outlines the changes and why they’re needed is best. Don’t sugar-coat bad changes. Trust in your employees to understand your decision and gain their trust in your employee benefit changes.

Dealing with Potential Fallout From Your Employees

Obviously, you can’t please everyone. There’s always going to be someone that’s negatively affected by a change, so how do you minimize the impact of your decision? Here are a few tips that can save you, your senior leaders, and HR teams from unnecessary conflict arising from changes to your company benefits:

• Understand exactly what your employee benefit changes will do, and how they will affect your staff
• Prepare your leaders (management, team leaders, HR staff) with the information you suspect that employees will want from them
• Provide staff with as much fact and information as is appropriate, in as many ways as possible
• Allow for feedback or input from staff about the changes, and create systems/strategies for addressing these concerns
• Be prepared to discuss and negotiate important concerns with your employee benefits provider, it’s possible they may have an easy solution

Some businesses will be more flexible with their employee benefits planning than others. Giving information to employees, however, is easy, and empowers them to take a little bit of ownership for not only their own benefits and perks but also in the future of your company.

Being open and providing information can also give you and your HR teams a little breathing space to deal with complaints from staff who claim “I didn’t know this would happen!” If staff choose not to engage with your communication strategy, then they only have themselves to blame.

Simplify Employee Benefits and Communicate Change?

Creating an effective communication strategy can be difficult, especially when addressing changes to employee benefits. To simplify this vital task, seeking help from employee benefits specialists such as Pacific Prime can help mitigate the potential risks.

Pacific Prime is a global insurance broker and employee benefits specialist with over 20 years of experience in the insurance industry. Our expert can help you filter through all the different maternity insurance plans to help you find a plan that suits you.

We see helping our clients communicate changes to their employees as a vital part of our brokering service – Whether it is just simple administrations or changes to employee benefits to suit your business goals, we are here to ensure that things go right.

We offer benefits orientations for new clients or existing partners looking to change employee health solutions, can take over the function of plan administration, analysis, and claims processing, and will provide a communication strategy for any employee benefits changes.

Contact us today for impartial advice or an obligation-free quote!

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Vista Nip

Content Creator at Pacific Prime

Vista is a content creator at Pacific Prime. With over 8 years of writing experience for online platforms on various topics such as luxury lifestyle and digital entertainment. He enjoys diving into complex and otherwise confusing topics, and creating easy-to-understand content for the readers to help them navigate through the topic - something that’s perfectly aligned with Pacific Prime’s motto of ‘simplifying insurance’.

Born and raised in the cultural melting pot that is Hong Kong, and having studied at an international school, Vista has developed a multicultural perspective that he uses in his writing and strives to connect to people of different backgrounds.

In his free time, Vista enjoys immersing himself in different worlds, from video games to light novels and movies. His hobbies help him expand his writing style by putting himself in the point-of-view of different people and characters.

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