Your benefits may be more powerful than you think.
Whether you’re overhauling your corporate culture, reinventing your brand or integrating lines of business, a well-communicated realignment of your pension and benefits program can serve as a powerful catalyst and springboard for introducing broader organizational change.
Given that a recent Workplace Institute study of senior Canadian executives revealed that only 31% of employers believe their workplace pension and retirement savings plans actually reflect key elements of the organization’s HR strategy, there appears to be an opportunity (and need) to start the process.
While benefits may not typically be viewed as leading attraction and retention tools, they nevertheless serve as a tangible and highly visible reflection of the organization and its underlying values. Moreover, because benefits touch your employees at a personal level, there is a real and immediate incentive for employees to understand the changes—as well as the underlying social, cultural and business factors driving them—and to modify their attitudes and behaviours.
The most obvious change involves the continued movement from DB pension, benefits and broader compensation programs to more flexible, but uncertain, DC arrangements—complete with connotations of shared accountability and wellness and performance-based rewards. Increasingly, resourceful organizations are using more subtle but targeted refinements to their broader total rewards framework to reshape their cultures and improve employee engagement.
If your vision involves attracting the brightest young digital recruits, for example, introducing a benefits program that includes home-purchase support for high-tech tools shows that you’re willing to put your money where your mouth is. Getting leadership buy-in and equipping your front-line people to promote the program will give it cultural significance, and ensuring your employees understand why having easy access to cutting-edge technology is important to your business will improve their line of sight.
Moreover, the brand you adopt for your new program (typically within a total rewards context) will send a clear and immediate message about who you are and where your emerging values lie. As any good marketer will tell you, building an effective brand involves more than designing a logo or turning out flashy materials. A well-conceived internal brand should help to codify, synthesize and reinforce your organization’s value proposition—and help to align the day-to-day thoughts and actions of your employees with your organization’s business objectives.
Remember, an effective benefits communication strategy includes finding out where your employees’ information needs are greatest and identifying how they want this information delivered. That expensive, overproduced benefits enrollment package, complete with glossy booklets and a full inventory of forms, may not send the right message—unless your primary audience is traditionalist. On the other hand, a celebratory town hall meeting to launch your killer new total rewards app or mobile-enabled Web portal might be just the thing.
Of course, the best way to ensure that you’re delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time is to test your strategy and materials on a representative group of plan members. Setting up a test team gives you an opportunity to involve your high-impact employees or unofficial opinion leaders early in the change process. Managed well, you might even convert some of your potentially most vocal critics into your best allies and change champions.
Best of all, your benefits program lends itself to personalized, timely, actionable communications. Done right, the communications infrastructure you create to introduce your new benefits program will be exactly what you need to propel your organization into the future.