Employees everywhere are prone to focusing on the negative when it comes to their benefits and compensation. It’s simply human nature. Here’s how one of our readers helped employees at her company realize how good they really have it.

Workers at the North Dakota-based company complained about their share of monthly health plan premiums being raised while salaries were frozen. While this situation is common nationwide, workers only cared about their own situation.

Grass wasn’t greener on the other side

Management hadn’t increased the cost shares for the sake of being stingy. A lot of time had been spent crunching numbers to minimize the pain for employees without cutting benefits. A key focus point: How much did other employers in the area deduct from employees’ paychecks for similar coverage?The research proved useful not only for setting employees’ contributions for the plan year. It also came in handy as an employee education tool. Workers saw that the grass wasn’t greener in other local organizations.

Despite the cost increase, employees’ cost shares remained lower than those at many other companies. Once they were confronted with the facts, there were few complaints about paying a few dollars more each pay period and an extra buck or two for co-pays.

Shifted education focus to area of company strength

Because raises weren’t the cards for most employees, and the firm’s base salaries were neither exceptionally high nor abnormally low for the industry and region, management looked focus on the areas of its benefits package where it was markedly superior to competitors.In this case, the company found that its retirement benefits were the strongest part of the benefits package. The firm was one of the few employers to offer its workers both a 401(k) and a traditional pension plan. To help employees realize that these benefits were just as important as base salary, the HR/Benefits manager took two key steps:

1. The company’s employee newsletter regularly focused on ways to plan for a comfortable retirement. Specifically, it looked at ways employees could take advantage of both plans to be able to retire without fear of financial hardship.

2. The company offered its employees access to third party retirement-planning counselors.

While nothing could totally erase employees’ concerns about their health benefits and salaries, people also saw that management hadn’t forgotten about their needs and they’d be taken care of.

One sure sign the message struck home: 401(k) participation increased significantly even before the company adopted automatic enrollment.