Can they appreciate what they don’t understand?
December 16, 2008 by Bill MeltzerPosted in: Employee education, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views
Nine of 10 HR managers polled by Colonial Life feel that employees have at least a vague notion that benefits are a valuable part of working at a company.
However, the same study found that only 21% of those employers believed their employees had a strong understanding of the workings of their own benefits. And 5% believed that their employees didn’t know anything about their benefit options.
Implication: The greater emphasis placed on employee education, the more likely workers understand the role of benefits in total compensation.
December 18th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Whose fault is it? The employees for not paying attention in benefit meetings – or not reading the SPD, or the HR rep who presents the info?
December 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
The deficiency most often comes from the amount of information given to an employee at one time, whether during new hire orientation or annual open enrollments. Human good attention span is 15 minutes. The majority of people do not like to read lengthy material save the analytical type personalities – and hopefully you have a good blend of personaliy types at work. Therefore, a helpful way to get the attention is to provide employees with a Benefits Summary in a more concise way a few times a year. Emails have been efficient to distribute the summaries more than posting in the website. After that you start getting calls with inquiries and can explain to the person in simpler ways. Based on the questions and inquiries you get you can also prepare some newsletter with Q&As for all. But you will still get the one or the other who will say he did not know what was available. Sigh, smile, and do the due diligence as the HR knight anyway.
December 18th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Unfortunately many employees do not know the true value of their benefits until they lose them.