Employee financial stress is harming productivity at work

In January the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) questioned HR professionals about how employee work habits were impacted by personal financial anxiety. Of the negative effects financial stress has on employees, HR professionals cited these as the top problems:

• The ability to focus on work (47%).
• Overall stress levels (46%)
• General productivity (26%)

And a whopping 72% said employees were more likely to dip into employer-sponsored retirement accounts in the past year than in previous years.

Employees responding to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2012 Financial Wellness Survey echoed these sentiments.

• One-third had indeed withdrawn retirement funds to pay for something else (29%).
• Over half of the respondents’ levels of stress about finances had risen over the past year (56%). The highest levels of stress were reported amongst workers aged 35 to 44, which is especially troubling since this group makes up 21.7% of the U.S. workforce.
• Nearly all employees responding used work time to think about or deal with an issue related to personal finance (97%).

So what’s an HR manager to do? You can’t solve all of your employees’ financial woes, but better education is a great place to start. Here are some steps to help your employees out:

• Implement a financial education program – the sooner the better. This can include things like seminars, financial coaching, and Employee Assistance Programs.
• Focus employee on using 401(k) and retirement plans wisely, and clarify the consequences of early withdrawals

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.
• New Employment Orientation – an example of how you can transform your New Hire Orientation into an inspiring and informative first experience–available on demand–for your employees.
• Open Enrollment – shows how your Open Enrollment period can become an opportunity to deeply engage employees on benefits.

Watch our new demo videos.

• 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.

One GuideSpark customer, a large law firm with offices across the U.S., typically experienced an uptick in phone calls to their HR Help Line after on-site Open Enrollment events. Employees noticed discrepancies in information when discussing these meetings with their peers. Family decision makers who could not attend were also left with unanswered questions. HR was accustomed to clarifying information to confused employees and their spouses.

To curb these costs, the firm implemented a series of online videos to tell employees about Open Enrollment changes and existing benefit options. HR experienced a dramatic decrease—attributed to the more consistent video messaging—in Help Line calls from both employees and their families. The company also opened each live event with a video so that attendees quickly and accurately came up to speed on the topic at hand and were able to use the rest of the seminar asking specific high level questions–a more effective use of everyone’s time.

Learn more about how video can make your communications more consistent and help you save time and money in other ways. Read our whitepaper: Top 5 List: How Video Can Improve Benefits Communication

 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.

 Our new whitepaper, Top 5 List: How Video Can Improve Benefits Communication, will show you how incorporating video into your communication strategy can dramatically improve your benefits communication and save your company resources at the same time.

Employee Communications Trends

We obviously think that video is an important consumer trend for employers to embrace in their employee communications strategies.  Another consumer trend that you may be tired of hearing about at this point – social networking – is the latest to gain enterprise adoption.  There are two companies in this space that have created a sort of Facebook for the enterprise that are growing at impressive rates:

• Jive Software  – went public in December 2011 and reported 50% revenue growth in its first quarter as a public company
• Yammer – users, sales and the company itself all tripled in 2011 and rumor has it that the Yammer will be raising $50 million in funding.

Both Jive and Yammer talk about how quickly adoption grows with their products because these are communications technologies that many employees have been using for some time, in their personal lives.  That’s an important concept for HR professionals who are trying to compete for the attention of employees.  Because the thing is, employees learn and communicate differently than they did in the past.  A failure to acknowledge that will be to the detriment of many of your employee engagement goals.

Wellness Programs Call for Better Benefits Communications

Wellness programs are all the rage this year. But what’s the point of a program that employees don’t understand and, therefore, don’t use? Midwest Business Group on Health has done some research evaluating employee engagement in health benefits and wellness programs.

What they found: Employees still do not understand their benefits. Part of the reason why employees are having trouble meeting their wellness goals is a lack of good communication and resources. MBGH found, “Most employees and dependents don’t fully understand what health care benefits are available to them nor do they fully comprehend the summary plan description (SPD) or what requirements they need follow to achieve incentives (i.e. premium differentials) that may be part of the benefit plan design. As a result, communications efforts frequently go unnoticed, are ignored or misunderstood by the employee.”

According to MBGH, employees want:

• Clear, concise communications
  • “Employees indicate they want clear and concise communications on benefits and what’s available to them, such as cost, coverage, co-pays, benefit changes and who is in their physician network.”
  • Better tools and resources 
    • “Provide employees with best-in-class tools, resources and support, and make it convenient for them to have access to this information at any time.”
    • The ability to easily share information with spouses
      • “Include family members, especially spouses, in providing information about health care benefits and workplace programs.”

So, you may want to re-think some of your current approaches to benefits communications that probably involve a lot of lengthy documents locked behind the firewall.  Here are some quick tips:

• Establish a public website that provides on-demand access to employees and all family decision makers.
• Aggregate everything an employee will need to make educated decisions in a clear, organized way. Include plan docs, calculators, and links to enrollment and carrier websites.
• And most importantly, understand the role of the benefits guide.  It may have a place for those employees who want all of the juicy details but shouldn’t be something you lead with.  Pull out the most important points and serve them to employees in plain, non-jargon language. Your average employee is not going to understand all the insurance terms, let alone read through all of the dense plan docs. So make it easier on them with short, straightforward benefits communications.

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.

“Having a compelling video solution for new team members has really taken the benefits communications load off our HR team.”
- Kathy Boushie, Director, Corporate Human Resources, Meridian Health

As is the need to have a scalable benefits communications strategy: to use HR resources efficiently and effectively.

“GuideSpark made Maternity Leave education fast, convenient and valuable for our employees….the solution has the benefit of saving significant HR team hours.”
- Teresa Tracy – Manager, Global Benefits and Wellness, Adobe Systems

That’s not to say only large companies can truly benefit from video-based benefits communications. Common to all organizations, Adobe Systems and Meridian Health also need to communicate employee benefits information to family decision-makers and to provide information to employees at their convenience.

“An on-demand video solution proved to be a much more effective way to reach and engage Meridian’s very busy and distributed health care workforce.”
-Kathy Boushie, Director, Corporate Human Resources, Meridian Health

As GuideSpark’s longest standing customer, Adobe Systems has fully integrated its customized GuideSpark Benefits Video Library to convey and support the value of its Total Rewards package to new and existing employees.

“We make substantial investments in non-cash compensation programs. GuideSpark ensures that Adobe employees understand and value their Total Rewards package.”
- Rosemary Arriada-Keiper, Director, Global Benefits and Shared Services, Adobe Systems

To learn more about how Adobe Systems and Meridian Health improved their benefits communications and saved money with an affordable, customized GuideSpark Video Library, visit our website.

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.
• More than 25% of 20-30-year-olds expect no income at all from Social Security during retirement.

Another new report, “The Financial Recovery for Retirees Continues“, released by The Society of Actuaries, LIMRA and the International Foundation for Retirement Education offers this finding:

• The number of people who have NOT yet estimated how long their assets will last in retirement INCREASED significantly (to 46% from 38% last year).

Let’s review these results.

• We know we have to work longer.
• We’re hoping to make the same pay in the same jobs well into retirement.

But,

• We haven’t worked out if we actually have enough to retire based on what we have now.
• We think we need to save more than we are managing now in order to retire comfortably.

No wonder so many of us are worried and preoccupied. Except, of course, for the ones who are just burying their heads in the sand!

Sounds like a lot of us could benefit from a Financial Assessment and some Next Steps guidance.

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

Want more detail? Click here to watch the video course.

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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.”

GuideSpark’s system tracks the usage of our customers’ video libraries in great detail and provides this information the the HR department in an easy-to-read dashboard. Based on our customer statistics, the Top 5 Most Viewed Employee Benefits Videos are:

• Consumer Directed Health Plan
• Medical Plan Options
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Roth vs. Traditional 401(k)

To learn more about how to create benefits communication videos, click here to watch the video course: Transform Benefits Education with Video.