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.

1. Start with plan docs – Pull together and review all of your plan documents. View them through your employees’ eyes and be an advocate for their experience.
2. Decide on scope – Do you want a teaser to get employees interested, a full support solution that replaces your benefits guide or something in-between? Your choice will affect the watchability and usefulness of your video.
3. Beginnings and endings are critical – You have 30 seconds to buy attention span. Be creative. Wrap up with next steps.
4. Keep it Simple – Speak in plain English, as you would if you were having coffee with a good friend.
5. Find your voice – Are you corporate, anti-corporate or somewhere in-between? Make sure your video reflects your organization’s unique culture and voice.
6. Look and Feel – Consider incorporating these five elements:

• “Talking head” introduction – from a key executive is great for Open Enrollment or New Hire Training videos
• Company images – good for branding but be careful using faces as those employees may eventually leave
• Stock photography – select a powerful image to reinforce a key message
• Text – again, used sparingly, it can reinforce your key messages effectively
• Tables/charts/graphs – with video, you can walk your viewers through difficult concepts using tables, charts, graphs and other illustrations

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Drive 401(k) participation by tying to Open Enrollment

contribution changes to 401(k) plans during open enrollment, employers have seen an increase in participation.   The study showed an 11% year-over-year increase in the number of employees making a change to their retirement plan election as a result of the association with the health care open enrollment period.  And nearly all of these election changes were positive (93%), meaning employees started or increased contributions to a plan.

While Health & Welfare benefits enjoy an annual period for employees to reflect on their needs and make adjustments, retirement plans have not historically enjoyed this kind of attention.  And studies show that it’s sorely needed.  This Open Enrollment period, consider offering some communications dedicated to your 401(k) plan and provide easy access to make changes.  You may be surprised at how many employees engage.

Meaningful New Hire Connections

is formed much, much sooner.  In fact, like so many other things in life, your greatest opportunity to build trust and excitement about your organization is likely with the very first impression you make.

So, what’s your organization’s first impression?

Is it a thick new hire packet full of brochures and forms mailed to the home of a future employee?  Is it a live orientation that is delivered inconsistently  - with a great HR presenter in one location and a less than compelling/knowledgeable speaker in another.  Even worse, is that PowerPoint presentation given over the phone to new employees in remote locations?

Many of our customers have come to us with this problem: “We’re doing a lot of hiring this year.  Our new hire orientation process is resource intensive and not representing our organization’s culture or employee value proposition effectively. Help us!”

This is the type of problem that the multimedia web was created for.  Here are some important ways that web multimedia can help your new hire orientation process:

• Establish a meaningful connection with new hires.  Retire the static new hire packets and long PowerPoint presentations.  By leveraging web video you can build excitement and convey the unique and dynamic culture that exists in your organization.
• Provide a consistently rich experience customized to your company.  By moving to the web, employees and families across the globe have access to the same compelling new hire orientation experience.  It’s consistent and it’s available on demand.
• Reach them before they even get into the building.  Studies show that making a new hire feel welcome and comfortable from day one is imperative to their long-term success.  This is best accomplished by having a new hire spend time with their new team, working on real projects. Enable this to happen by reducing or even eliminating time consuming orientation meetings. Provide pre-boarder access to your online new hire orientation and have employees show up on their first day already informed about deadlines, benefits, etc. and ready to get started in their new role.
• Save time and money.  The web offers you the ability to reduce resource intensive live new hire orientation meetings and packets, binders and other paper materials.  Something tells me you won’t miss those overseas new hire orientation meetings at all hours of the morning and night…

Start with a Financial Health Assessment

initiatives are:   (1) becoming much more comprehensive and (2) demonstrating tangible business value.

In our own experiences with HR professionals, we see the expansion every day.  Wellness strategies are evolving and many employers are looking to better understand how employee money issues are impacting the productivity of their organization.

Sound overwhelming?  Well, it doesn’t have to be.

If you’re looking for a simple and cost-effective way to get your arms around financial wellness, we recommend starting with a financial health assessment. Think of it as a biometric screening of an employee’s financial health. Once you understand which issues are impacting employee productivity the most, you can confidently introduce programs that address the highest priority problems.  And, with an annual assessment, you can measure the progress you’ve made and demonstrate value.

Here are some important qualities that you’ll want to look for in an employee financial health assessment:

1. Be sure it addresses the complete financial picture. In addition to retirement, you’ll want to dig into credit/debt, personal protection and basic cash flow and budgeting issues.  Just as important is measuring the level of financial stress that employees are under which can have damaging impacts on productivity.  The Personal Finance Employee Education Foundation offers a Personal Financial Wellness Scale (free of charge) well suited to measuring financial stress.
2. Be clear about your intentions.  When it comes to something as personal as money, many employees may be reluctant to share information with their employer.  We recommend that employers only view the data in aggregate and be clear in communications with employees about what the data is being used for.
3. Keep it short and offer an incentive.  In addition to effective communications, keeping the assessment to 10 minutes in length and offering an incentive will really help drive participation rates.  Many of our customers have seen success with gift cards, deposits into a 401(k) or HSA and of course cash works too.
4. Reporting should be actionable – for employee and employer.  Upon completion of the assessment, an employee should receive immediate and easy to understand feedback about how to improve their personal situation.  For employers, it’s important to recognize that at the end of the assessment all you’ve got is data.  The hard part is in interpreting it.  Be sure that you have a capable team working with you that can benchmark the results, prioritize issues and provide you with actionable conclusions.
5. On-ramp to a full solution.  So, 37% of your employees are struggling with debt issues.  Now what?  You may want to choose an assessment provider that can offer an easy transition to education and services.

Employees seek retirement advice from their employers

A majority of people have agreed they would like more guidance from their employer about how to achieve retirement goals according to the 11^th Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey.

Perhaps not surprisingly, employees with a higher overall education level are more likely to be financially well in retirement. Only 63% of employees with only a high school diploma participated in a retirement plan, as opposed to 84% of those with a college degree.

But all education levels showed a desire for direction from their employers.

More than half of all surveyed, agreed that they would like more information and advice from their employer about how to reach retirement goals. In fact, employees surveyed indicated that “educational materials that are easier to understand” is the second biggest motivator in getting an employee to learn more about saving and investing for retirement (behind tax breaks/incentives).

Investing in better retirement education for employees is a cost-effective way to motivate employees to save for their retirement and ensure their financial wellness.

Benefits Communications Turn Risk Into Opportunity

As the economy improves, the tide may be turning once again according to several new studies.   Here are some key findings:

• Up to 60% of top performing employees plan to leave their organization within the next year
• In October 2010, the number of employees voluntarily quitting their jobs surpassed involuntary terminations
• Employees will be giving more serious consideration to new job opportunities than they would have in the past
• Employee engagement is at a historical low – some employees spend up to 50% of their time looking for another job

Think: risk and opportunity.

It’s time once again to use benefits as a strategic tool to keep your best employees and get new stars in the door. And don’t forget, your success is as much about how your benefits are communicated as the benefits themselves.

Employees Remain Cautious

according to the Q4:2010 Principal Financial Well-Being Index survey.  Here are some of the key takeaways:

• Half of employees did not feel better about their financial situation than they did a year ago. Nearly 40% of employees were still cautious about the economy.
• 72% of employees are concerned about their long-term financial future.
• Health care costs (65%) and economic uncertainty (59%) topped their short-term concerns.
• Living within their means (62%) and having an emergency fund (46%) were employees’ main priorities as they re-build their financial well-being.

While this data can be helpful as a benchmark, it’s always best to assess your own employees to understand their specific concerns and issues when it comes to money.   From this assessment, you can build the most effective financial wellness programs and have the greatest impact on the well being of your population.

Other notable findings included:

• 51% of employers surveyed saw an increase in employee wage garnishments
• 42% of employers surveyed saw an increase in employee emergency loans
• 34% employers surveyed saw an increase in employee requests for time off to deal with personal financial issues
• While 88% of employers provide retirement plan education, only 28% provide basic financial education on critical items such as budgeting, debt reduction and credit management.

One thing to focus on here is that 70% of survey respondents believe financial education is important and yet only 28% claim to offer a program.  What is the reason for this gap?

Employers surveyed cite cost, sacrificed work time to attend and higher priority competing items.  Let’s talk this through:

• Cost.  There has long been a misperception about the cost of financial wellness programs.  In our experience, companies can provide a financial wellness benefit for a cost equivalent to 1-2 employee lunches per year.  Not bad.
• Sacrificed work time.  A good financial wellness solution will offer online education (24/7 access), seminars and a financial coaching benefit.  All of these items can be made available to employees outside of normal work hours.  Even if these services are being used during work hours, it is likely far less than the time spent missing work and/or distracted on the job because of personal financial issues.
• Higher priority items.  While this one is hard to address without seeing the prioritized list, financial issues are likely one of the largest drains on productivity in organizations today.  A comprehensive financial wellness solution can produce an ROI to organizations of well over 3 to 1.

Providers face rising health care costs but still must supply the legally required amount of care.  To do so, 63% of employers who are changing plan details have decided to raise the percentage that employees contribute to the premium, while 46% aim to raise out-of-pocket maximums.  Another 61% will be offering consumer-directed health plans, or CDHPs, which are a proven method of increasing consumer flexibility while cutting costs.

With so many benefits changing, it is important that employees thoroughly understand the developments and the reasons behind them.  The efforts that must be undertaken to get an employee to fully understand a CDHP are substantial and probably well telegraphed at this point.  If your strategy is to introduce this complex new benefit with a few vendor-provided brochures, you’ll likely end up with the status quo – single digit adoption rates.

When changing health plans, benefits communication can help focus on the positive.

Shifting a larger share of the cost to employees will likely be seen as a negative no matter what you do.   But, it’s never a good idea to let employees come to their own conclusions about those changes.  With effective benefits communication, you can provide context and position plan changes with your employees. Further, you can show them how to better utilize their plans and capture the cost-savings opportunities that are available to them.  Investing in benefits communication is perhaps the easiest and most cost-effective way to improve the perception that employees have about their benefits and about you as an employer, even in the wake of negative changes.

So, the natural question is why a credit score of all things would be used to evaluate a prospective employee?

One likely reason might be that employers worry that a poor credit score indicates a lack of responsibility that could ultimately translate into poor performance.

Credit score indicative of a poor performer?

But there may be another important reason…or, at least there should be.  The impact of poor employee financial health on corporate productivity has been well publicized in the wake of a troubled U.S. economy.  Many employers may feel that employees with poor credit are likely to spend significant time at work worrying about or dealing with their personal financial issues.  Or, worse yet, miss work entirely.

Whether or not a FICO score is a suitable barometer for a candidate’s future success, these results reveal that in the minds of many employers, there is an important link between control over personal finances and job performance.

But what about existing employees?

Employers might make more productive use of this link by introducing broad financial wellness education to current employees, rather than simply focusing on the credit histories of a few new hires – especially considering that credit reports are often explicable or simply inaccurate.

Many states are pushing to make the investigation of credit histories by prospective employers illegal. Employers will need to find a new tactic to ensure the financial health of their workforce.  A comprehensive financial wellness initiative can be a much more effective means towards this desired goal.