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How to Level Up Employee Benefits Education With Video

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As employee engagement continues to drift downward, organizations everywhere are looking for more efficient, effective ways to connect and communicate with their workforce. This is especially true for employee benefits education, where access to clear, complete and timely information is critical.

What better way to help employees understand their benefits than with video? In this article, we’ll explore why video is such an effective form of outreach, along with five ways you can use it to improve benefits education.

Why is Video Ideal for This Purpose?

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But what about video? In the business world, its popularity as a communication tool has skyrocketed over the past decade. And the pandemic only added fuel to the fire by forcing employers to shift toward video for internal communications.

Now, many organizations recognize just how powerful video can be in employee education. Why?

  • When people see and hear information within the context of a video, they’re more likely to understand and remember the message.
  • Video tutorials and walkthroughs are a great way to break down complex topics into manageable, memorable “bites.”
  • Video content is also highly shareable, so employees can easily pass information along and discuss it with others.

5 Ways to Enhance Benefits Education With Video

1. Offer Benefits Portal Tutorials and Walkthroughs

To ensure employees know how to navigate your benefits portal, it’s important to provide proper instruction. But with video, it’s no longer necessary to bombard people with lengthy written documentation.

Instead, brief tutorials are a great way to give employees a guided tour of your benefits site. Even a few quick, easy-to-follow videos can make all the difference in introducing employees to the portal so they become more comfortable conducting research and serving themselves.

2. Create Enrollment Screencasts

Enrolling in benefits can be daunting, especially when people are unfamiliar with the process. Rather than sending out lengthy written instructions or expecting employees to figure it out independently, you can use screencasting to walk them through the entire process, step-by-step. This helps people understand the open enrollment process, so they don’t become confused or frustrated by complexity.

Offering useful screencasts requires thoughtful upfront planning and production. But in the long run, it can save your benefits administrators significant time, by reducing the volume of routine questions and issues they must resolve.

3. Focus on Key Topics of Interest

Instructional videos are a terrific option if you want to provide more in-depth information about particular benefits topics. These videos can cover anything from an overview of your company’s health insurance plans, to guidance on how to use key portal features.

This is also a smart way to address common concerns or misconceptions employees may have about selecting or managing their benefits. By providing clear, concise information in a compelling visual format, you can help employees better understand every aspect of their benefits and how to use them.

4. Conduct Virtual Benefits Fairs

If your company offers a variety of benefits, staging a virtual benefits fair can be a useful way to consolidate information into a highly accessible “all-in-one” live online experience. Plus, you can record the sessions and make them available on-demand so employees can attend at their convenience.

Your programming could involve a series of short videos covering each benefit category. These sessions could be followed by an interactive Q&A session, where employees can ask questions of an expert at your company or from a related benefits vendor. This gives participants access to the information they need to make better-informed decisions.

5. Produce Video Testimonials

One of the most compelling ways to engage employees in benefits education is to illustrate how others are using these benefits. And what better way to do this than with video testimonials that let members of your workforce tell their story in their own words?

Featured employees can talk about why and how they selected specific benefits to improve their health, save for financial goals, or improve their quality of life. This not only helps others feel comfortable about their benefits decisions, even as it reinforces your organization’s commitment to workforce wellbeing.

Video Engagement Best Practices

Now that we’ve explored ways to use video to engage your employees in benefits education, let’s look at some best practices to keep in mind when creating any video content:

  • Be sure to put the audience’s interests first. What are their needs? What information do they want to see? How much time are they likely to invest in consuming this content? What should their next move be?
  • Strive to keep your videos short and to the point. Employees are busy and often can’t devote time or attention to long-form content.
  • Always test videos before you launch and promote them. Make sure they work correctly from end-to-end, and that employees can understand the concepts you’re trying to communicate. This will ensure a positive, productive enrollment experience for employees and support your broader organizational goals.
  • Don’t forget the marketing outreach needed to make employees aware of any education resources. Unseen video has little value, so be sure you invest in communication that will lead people to your educational content.

Closing Notes

Helping employees understand their benefits is crucial for employers and human resources departments. If you haven’t considered using video to communicate this information, you’re missing an opportunity to present complex benefits information in a way that is meaningful, quick and easy for employees to access. And in the long run, this self-service content can save your HR team significant time and money.

4 Steps to Hit the Mark for Open Enrollment

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Is the benefits information you have to tell employees important before and during Open Enrollment? You bet! Easily understood? Not always. 

According to the latest MetLife employee benefits trends, close to 90% of employers believe their benefits are clear and easy to understand. Yet only 65% of employees (only 56% Gen Z) agree. 

Uncomplicating the complicated is not an easy task, but it’s well worth the effort. Employees who better understand their benefits are ones who better appreciate the benefits they have. 

Let’s look at 4 steps to help supercharge your Open Enrollment communications strategy.

Step 1: Know Your Audience

For HR, this means not just thinking about employees. Think like employees. Heck, you are an employee.

When Open Enrollment season hits, chances are you’ll be making some decisions about your benefits. Just like all the other employees. What (and who) are you thinking about when you’re comparing options? Your family? Your health? The costs? The coverage? Yep…just like all the other employees.

If you can hold on to that “employee to employee” connection when you’re communicating to them about benefits, you’re more likely to create understandable, compelling communications. Make your messages relatable and relevant, with a hint of emotion.

Relatable – We’re all people. We can empathize with each other. Remember this when you communicate to employees. Make an emotional connection. That’s how you get employees to engage.

What does that mean? For example, many employees have families they love, and so do you. And you all want the best benefits you can get for them. Relay that feeling.

Relevant – Present information from the employees’ points of view, not the company’s. Avoid touting your company’s awesomeness (“We’ve added a great new dental plan”). Talk more about why it matters to them (“You have more dentists to choose from in the new plan”). Instead of saying, “We have a new enrollment system,” say, “You can enroll faster and easier with our new enrollment system.”

Keep the message conversational, too. If you were talking to a colleague, how would you get your message across? Probably not in a verbose, run-on sentence with oodles of detail. 

Step 2: Plan Bite-Size Information

If you’re sending a firehose flow of information two weeks prior to Open Enrollment, employees will not absorb everything you’re telling them. Try starting communications about six to eight weeks prior to your OE start date, especially if you’re making major changes. 

Strive for a slow drip campaign that feeds bite-size bits of information. A sample campaign for a late October enrollment may look like this…

Late August

  • Teaser/kick-off announcements
  • Watch for what’s to come messaging
  • Training webinar for leaders and HR partners

September

  • Weekly or bi-weekly communications with chunks of information
  • Home mailer with highlights and a few important details
  • Portal/website or interactive guide with a deeper dive into info, tools, and resources

Mid-October

  • Meetings, webinars, and benefits sessions
  • Displays for enrollment to-do’s and timing
  • Weekly reminders to enroll (first day, one week left, last day)

To get the word out, a wide variety of channels is best. But when it comes to education, a Colonial Life Employee Enrollment Survey (via Unum) shows how employees rank their three top choices: benefits portal or website, in-person counseling session, or printed materials.

Step 3: Stay on Point!

When you start crafting your Open Enrollment communications this year, remember that employees:

  • Check their phones 150 times a day
  • Check email 30 times an hour
  • And are still trying to do their jobs

Competition for their attention is fierce. How do you break through the distractions, buzzing and beeping all around them? 

Diligently.

You must spend time considering the message you’re putting out there. Is it going to drive the results you’re hoping for? The key is to build messaging super-focused on achieving that objective. Avoid filling headspace or airwaves with any other content — stick to information employees need to know to make the decision at hand.

Also, our brains don’t want to work hard at processing information. Keep content easy-to-read and scannable. 

  • Short sentences (14 words or less)
  • Short paragraphs (3 sentences or less) 
  • Eighth-grade reading level
  • “Chunked-out” content with subheads (bite-size)
  • Lots of “you” and “your” and less “we”
  • Human language — no acronyms and other benefit geek speak

Don’t be afraid to use phrases and incomplete sentences. No, really. (See what we did there?) It goes against everything you learned in grammar class but write like you talk. Employees will trust it more, as they read it like a conversation.

One last trick — after you’ve created your first draft, cut the amount of text in half. Get rid of any sentences that are repetitive or words that don’t help employees understand your message.

It may be interesting, amusing, or truly relevant, but if it’s not essential, it’s just brain clutter.

Step 4: Don’t Bury the Bad News

They may not like bad news — but they’ll like it even less when they find it hidden among other news. Employees are adults. They can adapt to change if you’re upfront, honest, and help them through it.

Rip off the band-aid. Give them the “why” of the situation through consistent and continuous communications.

  • Tell the same story, the same way, and tell it often
  • Provide a specific date when they’ll know more
  • Be honest and open (or transparent if you speak HR)

Are rates increasing? Probably because the company’s costs keep increasing. Explain that to employees. “U.S. health care costs are expected to rise 10-15 percent this year, but we’re keeping your increase lower, at only 6 percent.”

It’s Time to Change Things Up

HR professionals tend to be criticized for overexplaining and using confusing terms that make benefits hard to understand. We know why that happens, and we get it. 

Put in the work now so you can achieve effective, results-generating communications. Communications that have higher employee engagement. But put yourself in employee shoes when you communicate. Wait…you’re wearing employee shoes.

The Real Reason Your Benefits Communications Have It Backward

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Successful benefits communications is an issue almost every company struggles with. We see it every day in our work, and we read about it often in publications and on sites just like this.

Most companies focus the bulk of their benefits communications on facts: The cost of your plan. How voluntary products mesh with medical coverage. The likelihood of experiencing a covered condition. Most benefit communications are littered with these numbers and details, all in an effort to help employees make informed decisions when it comes to their voluntary benefits. Then, once we state this information, we try to make it personal and add an emotional appeal.

Except most of these companies have it completely backward.

At Trustmark we recently shared research that found employees prefer the opposite of how many of us have approached benefit communications. It turns out that employees are responding and acting based more on emotional cues than factual ones.

Are you surprised? I was, until I started delving further into the research.

Our research found that 40 percent of employees said the primary reason they enrolled in benefits was “It’s important to have peace of mind.” Another 25 percent said “It’s the responsible thing to do.” Employees are making benefits choices with their hearts, not their minds. It’s a shift that benefits and HR professionals need to start taking into consideration as they develop communications plans for the upcoming enrollment season.

Our research also found that only 13 percent of employees cite the details of their insurance plan as their primary reason for enrollment. And just 18 percent of those polled said that liking the details of the plan was even a factor in their decision.

What’s happening here seems fairly obvious: Employees are making benefits-purchasing decisions based on emotions. Sure, facts still matter when it comes to communicating with employees about benefits, but they just aren’t the key reasons anyone is enrolling anymore.

In fact, the deeper you get into the specifics related to health care, the less it appears to resonate.

Only 7 percent of employees said the “medical gap” was the reason they enrolled in voluntary benefits. This has been a message the insurance industry has focused on for years. But now, it seems, that message is not resonating with employees. And it’s most likely another reason most benefits communications are failing to truly reach employees.

The bigger picture is this: Employees are making benefits-purchase decisions the same way they make other purchase decisions — with emotion. Consider the way you think about consumer brands:

  • Do you feel like you need the newest smartphone to keep up with friends and family?
  • Do you regularly buy a specific brand of peanut butter because your family always had it when you were growing up?
  • Do you get your coffee each morning at the same coffee shop because you like being greeted by the same barista and people in line each day?

It’s all about emotions.

So how do you take this information and start shifting your approach? First, resist the strong urge to rely on facts, figures and details. I know it will be hard, but consider not leading with them. Instead try driving home a sense of responsibility and play to that “peace of mind” 40 percent of employees mentioned in our survey.

Start your communications to employees by making it personal — provide an illustrative example to demonstrate your point. Consider different experiences and observations you can draw upon.

Let me give you a personal example. A member of my team recently experienced shortness of breath during exercise. After undergoing multiple tests, this relatively young man discovered he needed immediate triple-bypass surgery to treat an 80 percent blockage to his “widowmaker” artery. As he went through the treatment and recovery, this team member got a real-life introduction to the financial challenges that arise from a serious medical condition. What if you were to lead with THAT story in your next benefits communication to employees? Wouldn’t that be a great way to remind employees that something like this could happen to anyone? That it’s important that we are all adequately protected?

If you feel as though you might be approaching benefits communications backward — leading with facts and figures, and then filling in emotional color after the fact — you’re not alone. But it’s never too late to adjust your approach. Creating an emotional connection with employees can help you play on the feeling of concern employees have for themselves, their finances and their families, versus talking about the rational calculation of the benefit features or how the benefits fill in a gap with the employees’ existing medical coverage.