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6 Principles We Use to Talk to Employees About Benefits
A recent poll found that 20% of Americans would rather watch a movie about the life of Lindsay Lohan than enroll in benefits.1
And another survey reported that 41% of employees spend less than 15 minutes selecting benefits, while the average time spent shopping for a new computer is four hours. 2
Why such apathy when it comes to the topic of employee benefits?
Our goal at Liazon is to make open enrollment for our users free of pain and even engaging. How? By giving people the information they need to make good decisions, by eliminating jargon, and by making it enjoyable. We aim to simulate the experience of having a conversation with an educated benefits professional who can provide context and background information.
When we develop language in Bright Choices®, we abide by the following 6 principles:
1. Explain concepts simply. Our main goal is to provide easy-to-understand and relevant information and we do this by couching things in simple, every day language free of jargon.
2. Respect your audience. We treat people as adults, capable of taking in facts and interpreting them according to their needs and opinions.
3. Keep it real, keep it honest. We don’t scare, instill fear, or play games to sell more insurance. We tell people both the pros and cons.
4. Take it seriously. We don’t sugar-coat or appear cutesy/punny. Sometimes we have to talk about difficult what-ifs because insurance is important for the most difficult times in life.
5. Explain rather than avoid. When we use traditional benefits terms (such as co-pay, deductible), which are important concepts to understand, we define them.
6. Tone matters. Our tone is educational, explanatory, direct, and to the point. Storytelling and providing interesting, engaging information is highly encouraged.
We know most people will want to get in and out of a conversation about benefits as quickly as possible, so we respect that reality. Our surveys show that 30% of Bright Choices users spend less than 30 minutes shopping for benefits, and 59% of people spend less than an hour. And even though that’s more than the national stat above, almost 70% of them say that the time spent using Bright Choices met their expectations. By inputting their health, wealth and personality information and using the resulting Bright Choices’s recommendation as a guide, people can make smart benefits decisions in very little time.
Others want to educate themselves about benefits in order to make their selections. They make use of our side-by-side comparison tools, watch videos, read articles, and more. For them, our “Tell Me More” educational resource is invaluable, both during open enrollment and throughout the year, to help them choose and use their benefits effectively. Of those respondents using these educational tools within Bright Choices, they find them to be helpful 80-100% of the time.
Everything we do at Liazon is about helping our Bright Choices users get the most from their benefits dollars. That means they need to understand their options, select the right plans, and use them effectively. And that’s an important conversation to have.
1 Employee Benefit News, “5 Things Employees Would Rather Do Than Enroll in Benefits,” October 23, 2014
2 Benefits Pro, “Employees Benefits’ 15 Minutes,” Sep. 14, 2014
