“Bright Spots” in Benefits Communication and Education
March 17, 2016We’ve all heard that we learn more from our failures than our successes.
But is that really true? Recent research demonstrates the opposite to be true—that there is actually a tremendous amount we can learn from our success. And, further, that leveraging our successes can create major, systemic change and transform cultures within organizations, often in relatively short amounts of time. In their best-selling book, Switch, Chip and Dan Health call these successes “bright spots” and draw upon large scale research studies to show the impact of studying and replicating success.
We’ve seen the same thing from a benefits communication and education perspective: Most employers have experienced major successes in their benefits communication. Maybe not consistently, but if they go back over the last few years they can identify campaigns that really engaged employees, significantly increased participation in benefit programs, and really helped employees better manage their benefits. In some cases, the campaigns may have been so successful they took on a life of their own—becoming viral and even institutionalizing themselves into a culture as an annual event or contest.
When we work with employers, we recommend they examine their best campaigns and initiatives—starting with benefits communication and planning but expanding into overall HR initiatives to determine what the successful programs have in common. In every case where our clients have gone through this exercise, they’ve been able to identify common themes. In some environments, a sense of community is extremely important. Therefore, creating a forum where employees actively participate in the dialogue and interact with each other is vitally important. For others, it’s about target marketing—getting the right groups the right information in the right way at the right time so the communication has a highly personal feel. In other cases, it’s about repetition and making it part of day to day communications and ultimately the culture of an employer group—or even making it part of employee identity. Of course there are always those environments that are all about fun—where employees work incredibly hard and can become burned out and immune to communications because they simply don’t have the energy or enthusiasm to look at one more thing. In these environments, it’s about creating special occasions and events that are fun and allow employees to get their minds completely off work and focused for a moment on themselves and what they need to do to maximize the benefits they have in order to achieve their most important life goals.
At the end of the day, every company is different, but you can almost always find a pattern in your success, and then use these patterns as your roadmap in developing new campaigns that will resonate with your employees. Over time, you’ll end up developing a brand and culture associated with your benefits communications that differentiates your company as an employer of choice and creates a more cohesive (and ideally a more fun) working environment.