Today, GuideSpark announced two new modules for its Benefits Learning Center solution. These modules automate and streamline New Hire Training and benefits communications for Open Enrollment. As companies continue to prioritize doing more with less, many employers are looking for more efficient and effective ways to deal with these resource-intensive processes.
Consider for a moment the staff time and dollars go into facilitating New Hire Training and Open Enrollment each year. Many companies we’ve met with offer half-day New Hire orientations on a near weekly basis. Not to mention the time and effort that goes into the creation of the stacks of paper that employees receive on their first day. Open enrollment presents a similar situation. Each year, HR staff offer a collection of live seminars to explain benefits changes, often preceded by brochures, mailers and the like. Despite all of this effort, nearly 80% of employers believe that their employees do not have a good understanding of their benefits.
Many employers have asked us how they free up their valuable, and in many cases shrinking HR staff to work on strategic projects while improving rates of benefits understanding among employees. In addition, finding ways to communicate effectively has become an even higher priority as employers prepare to make difficult announcements about cutting programs and/or asking employees to take on a greater share of health care costs.
Our answers to such questions naturally start with what we know to be true about today’s employees:
- First, given the trend of increasingly distributed workforces and the importance of family decision makers, on-site seminars fail to provide reach
- Next, given the explosion of web multimedia and sites like YouTube, employees have become accustomed to rich, short-form content. The busy professional of today simply does not have the attention span to thumb through lengthy benefits documents.
GuideSpark’s Benefits Learning Center modules embrace these trends to provide a modern and engaging multimedia solution capable of reaching your distributed workforce and their families. This online solution automates open enrollment and new hire training workflows to free up valuable resources. Employees have on demand access to a library of multimedia benefits presentations, allowing them to direct and personalize their learning experience. In addition, these modules offer custom checklists for open enrollment and new hire on boarding, so that employees can conveniently track their progress.
Please take a look at the New Hire Training and Open Enrollment demonstrations on our site to better understand the power of these new modules.
Today, GuideSpark announced availability of a new white paper on the ways to leverage Web 2.0 to transform benefits communications.
It may surprise you to learn that over 50% of employed Americans received a majority of their financial and health products from their employer, making employer-sponsored benefits a critical aspect of an employee’s overall financial wellness.
If there is one statistic that encapsulates the problem that GuideSpark is attempting to solve with our Benefits Learning Center solution, it is this one: “4 out of 5 employers believe that their employees don’t have a good understanding of their benefits.”
Amazing, isn’t it?
U.S. employers spent approximately $1.5 trillion on benefits (18.6% of total compensation) in 2007 and yet only 21% believe that they have been effective in educating employees on this key element of compensation.
So, the question becomes: with all that’s at stake, how do employers like you fix this problem? Well, the first thing to do is to admit that the benefits handbook and other text-heavy approaches to communications are failing you, your benefits investment and your employees. Now, accept that the way that employees learn and get information has fundamentally changed and in a Web 2.0 world, benefits communications must be:
- Accessible. Workforces are becoming more and more distributed each day and an employee’s family makes up 60-70% of an employer’s health care cost and are often the ones making the decisions.
- Engaging. The attention span of the busy professional is short and shrinking. Short-form, interactive education is what an employee expects in this world of YouTube and Twitter.
- Collaborative. The web has become a marketplace of ideas and experiences. Provide your employees with opportunities to understand what decisions colleagues are making and allow them to learn from one another.
- Ubiquitous. Stay in front of your employees by leveraging the latest forms of communications including blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter).
- Personalized. Integrate planning tools and calculators that allow employees to take what they’ve learned and apply it to their situation. Provide an easy on-ramp to personalized support from experts.
If you follow these principles and put together a highly effective benefits communications strategy, studies show that you can reduce the cost of benefits by 10-20% and significantly improve productivity and retention. To learn more about how to leverage Web 2.0 techniques at your company, please download our white paper.
Today, GuideSpark announced two core products focused on the issues of corporate benefits education and employee financial wellness. Over the last 18 months, we’ve had a chance to meet with many employers – from small businesses to large enterprises, from Silicon Valley technology companies to retail chains to government organizations. Not surprisingly, each of these employers carries a similar burden – how to reduce the cost of benefits while continuing to offer a competitive compensation package.
While many HR professionals concede that their employees have a poor understanding of their benefits package, most underestimate the impact of this situation on their bottom line. Employees who don’t understand their benefits are more likely to:
- Make poor election decisions, driving up benefit costs
- Access benefits information in the most costly way possible – through calls to your human resources staff and call center
- Be less satisfied with their compensation and more likely to leave
Benefits communications is a critical tool for managing costs in this environment. Our offerings are targeted at improving the failing rates of benefits understanding among employees today to help employers realize the full value of their considerable investments in benefits. We move far beyond the standard fare of thick benefits handbooks to provide a comprehensive curriculum of engaging multimedia education for today’s employee. By providing more modern and more effective benefits communications, employers can cut the cost of benefits, while motivating and retaining employees.
The core of GuideSpark’s Financial Wellness Center is our new online learning service. Over the past few years we’ve experienced an explosion of new web technologies and services that have changed how online users interact and learn on the web. The GuideSpark solution leverages many of these latest trends of the consumer web to create a new learning solution designed for corporations and organizations. Our solution creates a high impact, rich media experience designed especially for today’s web information user. We hope our solution starts a new trend in corporate learning experiences.
Over the past 10 months we’ve been hard at work building out our new online learning service, so it’s great to publicly launch our new offering – a corporate solution for financial education and wellness. When we started the company earlier this year we didn’t realize how bad the economic situation would get, but our solution definitely comes at a time when financial issues and worries are top of mind for most US workers. We hope our solution provides people with the information and tools to put themselves on a solid financial path.
As a complement to our service, we’re launching this Financial Wellness blog to share our thoughts and ideas about current financial issues and trends. We hope this blog will provide readers with a valuable discussion about our company, solution and most of all financial wellness.
