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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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.

Focused Benefits Education Can Help You Drive CDHP Enrollment

their families.  In light of recent studies, employer interest in Consumer Driven Health Plans or CDHPs has grown tremendously.  In fact, a recent study by NBGH/Towers Watson finds that 54% of companies offer a CDHP and that number is expected to grow to 61% in 2011.

One of the more widely quoted surveys that illustrate cost savings is from health insurer Aetna.  In late 2009, Aetna published the results from a six-year study of its 2.6 million members and 410,000 members of the Aetna HealthFund consumer directed plan.  One key finding from this study showed that employers who offer the Aetna HealthFund as an option experienced savings of $7 million per 10,000 members over a  five year period.

But there is an opportunity for employers to save much more than that.  Aetna also offered this nugget:

“Employers that offered CDH plans as an option but who engaged employees for adoption using strategies identified as best-in-class saved $23 million per 10,000 members over five years.”

Imagine that.  An effective employee engagement plan is worth $16 million in cost savings (per 10,000 members over five years).  For many employers, employee engagement is an after-thought despite the importance to the overall success of the CDHP initiative.  In my discussions with employers, many have a sense that they are not maximizing the cost savings opportunity provided by their CDHP, but too many have no idea how much money they are leaving on the table.

Employee engagement is more of an art than a science.  To capture the kind of savings described above, most experts agree that it requires focused and ongoing employee education.  Sure, you can offer incentives to encourage adoption and promote certain behaviors but at the end of the day, an employee will not choose a plan unless he or she understands how it works.  The typical consumer driven plan is complex and an employee doesn’t need to look at the plan very long to see that it involves taking on more financial responsibility.  After all, that’s the point of a CDHP.

And so, given the absence of time and impression of risk, most employees would just assume stick with what they know and choose the PPO/HMO option.  And that’s the state we find ourselves in with many employers unable to push employee enrollment figures past the single-digit mark.