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Spring Forward and Communicate to Your Employees Often About Available Benefits
If you’re in Human Resources, you may feel like you’ve barely left behind last year’s open enrollment and 2025 implementation. Your employees, however, likely need reminding of what is available to them. Various employer/employee studies show that between 50 and 85 percent of employees are often confused by their benefits offerings. While surprising numbers, they demonstrate that there’s ample opportunity to promote your school’s benefits more often.
The start of each season offers an excellent time to remind your faculty and staff about their benefits. With spring upon us, here are four approaches to consider when reminding your employees of what's available and how to use their health benefits more effectively.
1. Highlight any new value-added services or programs on their own
Open enrollment is inherently the time to package and promote all employee benefits. That said, sometimes the extra programs you brought on, e.g., new services through your employee assistance or lifestyle account vendors or free on-campus activities, get overlooked while your faculty and staff need to make time-sensitive medical plan choices. Featuring these value-added offerings on their own, outside of open enrollment, can be a more effective way to promote them.
Whether a spotlight in a newsletter, on your intranet, or even on digital boards across campus, a “don’t forget you have access to this new service or program” update may catch the attention of more employees when not focused on enrolling in their medical plans. Short messaging can be quite effective in virtually any type of communication.
2. Connect benefits and programs with awareness months or seasonal activities
National awareness months, which help educate the public on various diseases or conditions, their risks, and available preventive measures, make for an ideal time to suggest accessing certain benefits. For example, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so to complement the national initiatives to promote the value of mental health and well-being, it’s an opportunity for you to remind employees of the behavioral health benefits available as part of their health plan coverage or employee assistance program (EAP).
Similarly, the different seasons can help you creatively highlight your benefits offerings. At one of our founding member-owner edHEALTH schools, Wheaton College, Human Resources and Benefits Specialist Phyllis Barba is using different uses of the word “spring” to remind its faculty and staff to take action to use available benefits. Wheaton’s current “Spring Clean Your Health” one-page flyer includes a short paragraph about each primary benefits vendor, e.g., health, pharmacy, dental benefits, EAP, and financial services, and encourages springing into action for scheduling appointments, getting screenings, and reviewing accounts.
Aligning the promotion of certain benefits with a particular season or time of year can resonate with employees as it also provides a timely action step. For example, many health and wellness reimbursements from health plans require three months of continuous membership. Knowing this, it makes the most sense for Human Resources staff to highlight this value-added program starting in late March or later so that employees can file for reimbursement around the same time they’ve read the reminder (assuming the employee has been active since January 1). While people often think of using telemedicine in the cold winter months, it can also be handy to remind faculty and staff that it's available if traveling during summer vacations.
3. Considering offering monthly office hours or workshops for employees to ask their benefits questions
While potentially more time-consuming, holding office hours or workshops can be a particularly valuable resource for your younger or new employees unfamiliar with how medical benefits work, especially if a plan has a deductible. Signing up for a health plan is easy, but understanding how cost-sharing works can be challenging. Having multiple opportunities to explain how specific benefits work can help alleviate employee stress and actually increase engagement. The better someone understands how something works, the less likely they are to complain.
Sessions like this don’t always need to be live; virtual can work, too. Whether emailing questions to a general mailbox or bringing questions to a monthly workshop, just making sure employees know who to reach out to and how, e.g., by email, phone, or in person, is key. You can never communicate too much when it comes to helping employees understand their benefits better.
4. Regularly remind FSA-enrolled employees of eligible items and how to submit for reimbursement
If your institution offers FSAs for employees to set aside pre-tax money to help cover out-of-pocket healthcare costs, like copays, deductibles, and other covered medical expenses, friendly reminders to submit their expenses throughout the year will be welcome! Including a list of IRS-qualified items makes the reminder twice as valuable. Your FSA vendor likely has existing lists to share, or you can create your own from trusted online resources, like fsafeds.gov.
edHEALTH member-owners: We want to hear how you reinforce your benefits offerings to faculty and staff! Please email Lisa Barnstein if you are willing to share your school’s approach with us. Whenever possible, we like to share best practices with fellow member-owners and our readers.
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