The secret to helping employees understand their benefits

Employee benefits can be mind-numbingly complicated—even for insurance professionals. Employees should be focused on their own jobs instead of spending their time combing through policy documents trying to understand the many details about the benefits that are available to them.

Unfortunately, only about half of employees feel confident that they fully understand their insurance benefits.¹ This lack of understanding is often attributed to lackluster or infrequent benefits communication from employers, which lowers employee satisfaction with those benefits.

Conversely, employees are more satisfied with their benefits when information about those benefits is readily available to them.¹ When those communications are easy to follow and easy to find, you have found the secret to helping employees better understand group insurance benefits: convenience.

Make benefits communications easy to digest.

Convenience starts with making benefits communications easy to understand. The most basic tenet of communication is to focus on your audience. Because insurance policies generally don't follow this rule, it is up to carriers and employers to help employees be aware of and better understand the benefits that are available to them.

This starts with enrollment communications, which work best with a year-round "drip" approach that utilizes regular but brief communications such as reminder emails. Learn more about this approach by reading our blog, 3 Ways to Improve Enrollment with a Year-Round Approach.

It is crucial that communications speak to employees on their level. Aim to regularly communicate information as if all your employees are entry-level and have no existing knowledge of group insurance benefits. Some of them just might be!

Here are some benefits communication ideas that can help you reach every employee:

• Break down coverages, billing, claims, etc. into a digestible employee benefits guide.
• Provide a glossary that explains jargon and spells out insurance acronyms.
• Share visuals like graphs, infographics, videos and claim examples.
• Send out monthly benefits reminders to all employees.
• Always provide ways for employees to learn more, either internally or by contacting the carrier.

Need help understanding insurance jargon? Check out our white paper and share it with your employees!

Insurance talk: let's decipher the jargon

More is better! In fact, multiple educational tools are ideal for reaching employees in various ways and helping them understand their options. Research has shown that a higher number of available resources directly correlates with more employees reporting an understanding of their insurance benefits.¹

For best results, be sure to utilize a wide variety of communications methods, including flyers, posters, brochures, videos, lunch 'n' learn presentations, emails, internal webpages, benefits fairs, and so on.

Source: 2023 BEAT Study, LIMRA

Meet your employees where they are.

Convenience extends to your efforts to reach employees wherever they are. At the end of the day, digital benefits communications tend to be the easiest way to reach employees. A benefits portal or intranet site can allow employers to keep employees abreast of updates and changes while providing helpful resources to employees no matter where they are located.

These digital hubs also allow employees to easily access their plan features, find important forms, and utilize tools to calculate flexible spending options, retirement savings and more.

Meeting employees where they are may look different based on your workforce. Regular emails may not be as useful to employees who spend their time in a production facility, warehouse, outdoor worksite, or driver's seat. Meeting the needs of these employees may look more like a monthly 10-minute huddle at the beginning of each shift or an automated voicemail message each quarter from your company's benefits administrator or HR manager.

Don't have a readily available benefits expert on staff? Educating managers to be your benefits advocates is your next best option. Help managers become familiar with benefits themselves so they can encourage their teams to utilize them.

Insurance carriers also offer online resources and toll-free helplines to answer any questions your employees may have about their coverage options. Making that information freely available to employees is a great starting point.

Let Allstate Benefits help.

Allstate Benefits offers a variety of resources to drive convenience and help educate employees about our voluntary products. Here are just some of the perks we offer to our customers:

• A full suite of digital and print marketing collateral created for employees, not for insurance actuaries
• Our MyBenefits mobile app and web portal, which allows our customers to see coverage explanations, submit claims on the go, and view policies and claim histories
• A dedicated team of benefits experts in the Allstate Benefits Customer Care Center who are here to help employees better understand their coverage

Contact a sales representative today to learn more about the many ways that the Good Hands® team works to help you and your employees.

Related Articles:

Employer Tips to Simplify Enrollment for Employees

Do Your Employees Know How to Use Their Health Benefits?

Why Employee Benefits Are Underutilized and How to Help