10 global benefits communications questions we were asked – and how we answered

Did you know that 93% of employees want to hear about their benefits year-round (Benefex survey data)? 

We recently hosted a webinar, “Benefits communications aren’t just for annual enrolment” where we shared how (and why) to keep employees engaged year-round, align your benefits communications with company goals, and build employee advocacy around your benefits scheme.  

With lots of benefits and reward leaders in attendance, we ended with a half an hour Q&A session. Here are the top ten questions and how we answered them… 

Top 10 global benefits communications questions 

#1: Have you got any tips on what the communications experience should look like for a new hire into the business? 

Here are 5 key considerations to take into account when planning a new joiner journey: 

1. Align your benefits messaging – everyone engaging with new hires (your recruiters, hiring manager or HR team) must be aligned on your benefits messaging and proposition. 
2. Consider the pre-hire experience – this is where employee engagement with your benefits programme begins. Pre-hire microsites are growing in popularity and provide a seamless, more personalised experience for employees entering the business. 
3. Provide a consumer grade tech experience – 50% of employees state that great workplace tech is now an important factor for them when choosing a new employer. Employees are used to the high-quality tech experiences they receive from their favourite platforms at home like Spotify and Netflix, so providing an intuitive and personalised tech experience can help you stand out.  
4. Create a cadence of regular communication – keep up regular comms about your benefits to your pre-hires and new joiners and make sure all touch points in their journey are consistent and they feel engaged from the off. 
5. Get your stakeholders on board – they should be informed, on board and advocating for your benefit scheme. For example, if you have senior leaders running sessions that introduce the company values to new joiners, consider adding a segment on how the benefits you offer support your values and mission.  

#2: Are there any rules of thumb when it comes to getting the best engagement for an email communication?  

Our best practice is to send them on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays at around 10am. The rationale for this is that a lot of people tend to book a half day on Friday or book the day off for a long weekend. This is also the same for Mondays; and if they haven’t, a Monday tends to be a bit busier, as people are catching up on work from the previous week. However, the later you get in the day, the lower your chance of engagement is.  

Check out our Global benefits communications guidebook for more tips on how to make sure your global benefits communications hit the mark. 

#3: We’re very reliant on emails for our benefits communications. How else can we increase benefits engagement?  

Email certainly has its place in benefits communications – our survey found that employees’ preferred channel for benefits communication is email (Benefex survey data). However, to go beyond email, consider your audience. Insight is key, so gather data on your employee demographics and the types of communication they consume outside of work, whether that’s podcasts, print materials, or digital formats. Listening to employee feedback enables you to deliver your message in a way that you know will resonate. Don’t be afraid to test different forms of media to find out which work, and which don’t, as well as which times of day drive the best engagement for your employee base. Got employees that aren’t desk-based? Think about their needs and motivations too, print materials can be a good way to drive engagement with them.  

#4: How can we convey what’s in it for the employees? 

Making your benefits communications about employees will help you get that all important buy-in. Are they going through a life event like buying or moving house, getting married, or even going through a divorce? One of our global customers centred a communication campaign around key life events, and this positioning resonated really well with their employees.  

Address employees on an individual level – use language like ‘you’ and ‘your’ rather than ‘us’ and ‘our’, and when you’re describing a benefit, always bring it back to why it’s important and how it can benefit them. And because people consume information in different ways, your communications should reflect the way people read – for example, using clear headers and making text scannable. Developing personas can be a good way to narrow down the types of employees you’re communicating to and what their challenges, goals and preferences are. Personas are semi-fictionalised representations of your audience and can help you be more targeted in your communications – we use data within OneHub to identify and segment personas for our customers to help target communications.  

#5: How can we encourage more employees to attend webinars with our brokers and providers? 

Firstly, timing is important; give yourself enough time to deliver a pre-event cadence of comms that builds up to the webinar and pick a quieter time of day for your webinar to increase attendance. You may even choose to run a couple of sessions if you’re holding a Q&A to give people the chance to get their questions answered.  

Secondly, offer people a hook – tell them why they should join, outline the importance of those benefits, and what they will learn if they attend. Over time you’ll resonate with your employees and can use that information to engage them. For example, rather than ‘learn about your pension investments’ try ‘why £100 is worth £100 in a pension and only £68 in your payslip.” For maximum reach, ask managers to encourage their teams to join. 

And lastly, don’t forget your follow up communications post-event. They’re a great way to maintain engagement with employees after the webinar; share the recording so employees can rewatch it or catch up if they missed it. 

#6: How would you tackle pushback from internal comms teams around there being too many communications, preventing the send of benefits comms?  

Work in collaboration with them to help get benefits on the agenda. Share your insight with your internal communications function on why benefits should form part of the regular calendar of communications. Backing this up with data can help you better make the case – such as the fact over 90% of employees want to hear about their benefits more regularly. And you can also highlight how the potential NI savings resulting from benefits take-up would benefit the business.  

You’ll also be able to pull data from your own benefits platform that show how communications are driving benefits engagements and uptake. Presenting these types of findings to your internal comms teams will help you build the case for including regular benefits communications in their calendar. 

#7: Do you have any tips for making global communications more visible and relevant across geographies?  

Involving and engaging your regional and local leads and providing them with a format to share key messages can help ensure global messages have a wider reach. Why not host quarterly communications round tables with the teams? By giving everyone insight into what you’re doing globally, and aligning on the tools and communications packs available to teams, you can create a much more consistent experience. We offer a Communications Manager tool that allows you to see your country-specific communications and results in one place.  

Thinking about communications for 10+ countries can feel overwhelming (and expensive!) Make use of ‘templated’ forms of communication that follow the same structures as one another, but that allow flexibility within them for different country needs. This gives local leads support with communication and provides visibility of what other countries are doing, but gives them tools to boost engagement locally.  

#8: What are your views on using nudges through an app, for example, at specific life events like returning from maternity leave, to improve engagement?  

This brings us back to reflecting that same personalised experience your employees receive in their everyday lives with the communications you share with them. Social media platforms display relevant and personalised ads based on your demographics, behaviours and more, so we can mimic this in our benefits comms through segmentation and personalisation.  

As long as what you’re sending is relevant to your employees, concepts like personal nudges can work really well – for example, if an employee has a benefit in their basket but hasn’t submitted, you could send them a reminder. Personalised communications will always give you a far better chance of engagement than a blanket message.  

#9: How can you grab employees’ attention when using short, punchy messaging without sounding like it’s being written by AI?  

This is a really pertinent question, as tools like ChatGPT grow in popularity. However, don’t underestimate the impact of a human touch. We feel that the scoping and analysis a human writer can do can’t be replaced with AI! For example, what have you learnt about employee preferences and behaviours from previous campaigns? What are the employees’ needs? What do they want? What do they feel? How do they like to consume media? Using insights like these to create your content sets you apart from AI, as you can provide relevant comms that are personal and interesting to recipients.  

Producing well-written communications is another important point. However, if you as a benefits team have skillsets that sit outside of copywriting, reach out to other teams that have these skills. Whether it’s your branding teams or your internal comms function, or the Benefex team, they’ll have the expertise to help you deliver that personalised and impactful message your employees want. 

#10: In a multinational company, how would you approach comms in countries where local language has been the practice? 

We tend to keep communications bilingual where that’s commonplace or where it’s expected; this can support consistency and make it more accessible to employees – so if the place your communications are directing your employees to (for example, into OneHub) and the content in the site is English and local language, your communication should be too to reflect that experience. There are some clever ways to speed up the translation process and to give employees the choice of which language they access their benefits in; for example, OneHub has a toggle function within comms manager that allows employees to switch between English and local language. We can also do this within guides and other PDFs we create for a streamlined approach.  

Watch the webinar on demand 

If you would like to hear more about how you can better leverage anytime communications to drive employee engagement, watch the on demand webinar ‘Benefits communications aren’t just for annual enrolment’.