Author Archive for Barbara Navarro

Have You Seen Our New Demo Videos?

Health and Financial Benefits, New Employment Orientation and Open Enrollment Covered

GuideSpark’s brilliant Content Development team has designed five new demo videos to give you a better idea of how you could be using video to engage your employees on benefits-related topics. All of these topics are covered in the GuideSpark Benefit Video Library.

  • High Deductible Health Plan with Health Savings Account (HSA) – shows employees how HSAs can be a good way to get the right health benefits while saving money.
  • 401(k) – discusses contribution matching, traditional vs Roth, investment options and more.
  • Making Your Money Work – covers basic information on Credit Scores, how they affect financial wellness and how to improve them.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on March 27, 2012

Consistent Benefits Communication Saves Money

Delivering consistent messaging is not just good communication, it saves time and money. This is surely an obvious statement, but how well do you implement it in your organization?

  • Are your informational events well attended?
  • Is everyone who wants to attend able to do so?
  • Do your support call numbers rise after a series of seminars?
  • Are many of the questions about confirming facts or clearing up discrepancies between presenters?
  • Do you feel that live seminars are an efficient use of resources?

With employee benefits videos, you can ensure that the same clear message is delivered to all of your employees–regardless of what location they work out of, what shift they’re on or whether or not they (or their family decision maker) can attend your seminar.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on March 16, 2012

Top 5 List: How Video Can Improve Benefits Communication

Top 5 List: How Video Can Improve Benefits CommunicationEveryone watches online videos. They’re easy, entertaining and informative. But they aren’t just for fun. Video is more than just a fad. It’s an improvement in how we communicate.

 Traditional methods of HR communication—including long and confusing plan documents, time-intensive on-site seminars, and jargon-filled emails that are usually ignored—simply aren’t engaging today’s workforce. Yet, the more we require employees to be benefits consumers, the stronger our need for effective, engaging communications. HR Departments that incorporate video into their benefits communication can enhance overall employee engagement, use HR resources more effectively and achieve ROI on key benefits programs.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on March 7, 2012

Learn How Two Fortune 100 Best Places to Work Communicate Benefits

How do Fortune 100 Best Places to Work communicate open enrollment changes and engage employees on benefit-related topics?

Adobe Systems and Meridian Health have both ranked on the FORTUNE 100 Best Places to Work in recent and multiple years. Both are leading organizations in their respective industries. And both have embraced the trend of using video as an integral part of their benefits communications strategies.

Though coming from very different backgrounds, technology and healthcare, Adobe Systems and Meridian Health share some of the same HR needs that large organizations experience. Each of their workforces are distributed over multiple domestic and, in Adobe’s case, international offices. The need to ensure consistent HR messaging across these locations is important.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on December 16, 2011

Later Retirement but Still No Financial Assessment

Last year it was 70. Now 80 is the “new 65”.

Middle class America is expecting to push out full retirement even later due to financial worries. We’re also expecting to have to save more. Yet almost half of us haven’t worked out how long we can last on what we’ve got already.

According to Wells Fargo’s new survey:

  • Almost half said that they expected to continue in the same job or a similar job of similar responsibility (expecting the same income level, we presume).
  • More than half said they need to significantly cut back on spending now to save for retirement.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on November 21, 2011

7 Steps for Deciding What to Include in Your Employee Benefits Video

Here’s another tidbit from our new video course: Transform Benefits Education with On-demand Video.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that we’ve touched on which benefits videos to start with to get the most interest and involvement from your viewers. Will it be your Consumer Directed Health Plan or your 401(k)? You will also have learned what to include in an Open Enrollment video, which is a powerful place to start engaging employees.

Once you’ve decided on which topic to cover, here’s a plan for pulling together everything you COULD talk about and, from that, how to work out what to actually include in your video and what to provide through supporting documents.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on October 28, 2011

Top 5 List: Most Viewed Employee Benefits Videos

If you are incorporating benefits videos into your communications strategy, how do you decide which videos to invest in first?

GuideSpark has created a new video course to assist HR departments making the exciting leap into video communication. In this course, our director of Content Development and Video expert extraordinaire, Joseph Larocque, explains that topics which are more complex or require careful explanation are natural places to start. Good candidates are core benefits, Open Enrollment changes and tough messages such as a premium increase.

“Video can really help people understand how these plans work, how they compare, and why they are compelling,” says Larocque. “If you are introducing one of these in the upcoming year, starting your video communications here will drive adoption.”

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Published by Barbara Navarro on October 21, 2011

Top 5 List: What to Include in Your Open Enrollment Video to Reduce Support Calls

Benefits communication videos aren’t rocket science, but it can sure help to have some experience with what works and what doesn’t.

In his new video course–Transform Benefits Education with Video–Joseph Larocque, GuideSpark’s Director of Content Development and video expert extraordinaire, recommends including these five pieces of basic information:

  1. Open Enrollment process and deadlines
  2. Open Enrollment events
  3. Changes to your plan
  4. How to enroll in benefits
  5. Where to get help

It may sound simple but HR departments are frequently tempted to include large amounts of detail in an Open Enrollment video. The key message here is NOT to give viewers everything they could possibly want to know. Just touch on the main points and tell the viewer where to go for more information.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on October 14, 2011

Effective Benefits Education Raises Satisfaction Regardless of the Package

As the recession forces companies to cut back on spending and get more out of their investments, here’s yet another study from UNUM offering evidence that investing in better benefits communications is sound advice.

Taken in December 2010 following last year’s annual enrollment period, the UNUM study finds that effective benefits education enables employees to make better choices, can increase employee loyalty and improves how employees rate their benefits packages.

They’ve wrapped up their findings in a catchy 3+3 slogan: three weeks plus three types of education methods = a better benefits education. This reflects the findings that apparently half of the employees surveyed had less than three weeks to review their benefits.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on October 12, 2011

Poor Benefits Communication Damages Both Employee and Employer Health and Financial Wellness

As busy as it can be, open enrollment is a good time to reflect on the effectiveness of your company’s benefits communication. While everyone seems to agree that benefits communication on the whole needs improvement, many organizations are in denial about how critical that improvement is to their own organization.

Findings from the 2011 Aflac WorkForces Report highlighted the discrepancy between how companies and their workers view benefits communications:

  • 85% of employers believe their HR departments are effective at benefits communication
  • 27% of employees say their HR communications are not very/not at all effective
  • 39% say the efforts are somewhat effective

And yet everyone agrees there is much needed improvement:

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Published by Barbara Navarro on October 10, 2011