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, delivering the latest web solutions for HR communications and training, introduces a video white paper to aid HR organizations in the development and launch of their own, customized benefits communication videos.

GuideSpark’s instructional video white paper provides HR organizations with a simple step-by-step process to create and launch customized employee benefits videos. By incorporating video into benefits education, HR organizations can engage employees and increase benefits adoption during open enrollment while saving time and resources. According to GuideSpark’s customer surveys, using rich video content typically garners an overall 98 percent satisfaction rate among employees who praise the “easy to follow,” “convenient” and cost-effective benefits communication videos.

“Across the board, we find HR organizations are juggling the dual goals of enabling employee self-service while driving toward a culture of well-informed benefits consumers,” said Joe Larocque, Director, Content Development, GuideSpark. “Without exception, they’ve seen great success using video to achieve both objectives through a deeper level of employee engagement.”

The video white paper provides information on:

• how to use video for quick wins during open enrollment
• which benefit programs gain the most from video education
• how to decide what to cover
• how to keep the video content simple and engaging

FORTUNE 100 Best Places to Work companies—Adobe Systems and Meridian Health—and other top organizations, currently use videos to improve engagement in benefits education.

Watch the complimentary video white paper “Transform Benefits Education with On-Demand Video”.

Forward-thinking companies that implement financial wellness initiatives can expect a return on investment of over 3:1, according to recent studies.

In its new white paper, “The Need for Financial Wellness,” experts from GuideSpark (formerly ThriveOn) discuss the advantages available to companies that take ownership of the financial health and wellness of their employees.

In a short time period, Web 2.0 technologies have transformed the way people learn and get information, yet have barely touched benefits communication. Lengthy text documents and static Web pages typify the ways companies attempt to educate their employees on increasingly complex benefit offerings.

Yet should companies care? In a new white paper, “Five Ways to Leverage Web 2.0 to Transform Benefits Communications,” GuideSpark experts Keith Kitani and Joseph Larocque discuss how many companies have failed to realize their investments in benefits, and ways they can use Web 2.0 technologies to transform benefits communications.

“Benefits are a critical lever companies use to attract, motivate and retain talented employees. Major studies support this,” said Keith Kitani, founder and chief executive officer. “It’s just good business to make sure employees understand their benefits so they make the most advantageous choices for themselves and their companies.”

Kitani added that employers relying on ponderous manuals and static Web pages are facing a number of trends that make the approach even more problematic – increasingly distributed workforces, the complexity caused by frequent changing of benefits, and overall, information overload among employees.

The GuideSpark white paper details five key recommendations for using Web 2.0 techniques to create more effective benefits communications. These techniques will provide real return on investment to employers.

Download the white paper here: Five 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Ubiquitous. Stay in front of your employees by leveraging the latest forms of communications including blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter).
5. 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.