How to Offer Workers Benefits Now

Such a dashboard can also deliver the kind of ongoing communications mentioned earlier, and can help employers navigate sudden policy changes, like last year’s rule shift that allowed workers to make benefits changes midyear. Robust, user-friendly online solutions will also make onboarding remote employees a smoother process.

3. Understand the diverse, multigenerational needs of the workforce.

Our workforce is multigenerational, and nowhere are generational differences more sharply defined than in the area of benefit needs.

Workers in their first full-time jobs may have different needs compared to a young parent, who has different needs from a near-retirement age worker caring for an elderly loved one.

Offering employees the ability to customize their benefits package based on those needs can help with talent attraction and retention. And communicating digitally also helps meet the different generations where they are, on email, social, and SMS depending on preference.

Technology can help employers manage this with not only an intuitive platform for benefits selection but a comprehensive pre-enrollment strategy, with customized, engaging information digitally distributed well ahead of the open enrollment period.

This is something of a missed opportunity for many employers, who not only rely too much on in-person informational sessions during the period but also don’t always communicate the full depth and breadth of benefits offered. For example, most workers focus on health care, but what about life insurance, or caregiver support?

4. Data, with appropriate guardrails, can help personalize and increase communication.

Knowing your customers and tailoring your communications is critical. To create this kind of customization and personalization effectively, a system needs good data. This could include things like buyer profiles that automatically assist with enrollment based on demographics. Think a message on screen saying: “People in your situation often select these packages …”

Knowing how employees are utilizing voluntary programs like health and wellness benefits can also help companies reinforce the programs workers care about.

Of course, there are tremendous sensitivities around the collection of customer data, and employers need to keep this top of mind. However, data remains an underutilized way for firms to hone their benefits strategy — A 2020 Equitable survey showed that only half of employers are taking advantage of existing data analytics tools.

Data can also help drive targeted communications to keep employees engaged year-round. A reminder email around a major life event, like a wedding or birth of a child, or around a specific date, like reminding workers to visit the ob-gyn during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, can help remind employees what is covered.

5. Benefits administration has changed. Be prepared.

Experienced, professional HR managers are still critically important for helping employees navigate an increasingly complex process.

But the increase in remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic has also shown that a technology-first strategy, including a user-friendly platform, constant direct communication and data driven customization through digital channels, is vital as well.

Companies need to be ready to meet the increasingly complex demands and digital savvy of the workforce.

(Credit: Vadym Pastukh/Shutterstock.com)

Stephanie Shields is head of employee benefits at Equitable.