Co-authored by Cary Putnal, Innovation Consultant of Newfront.

Facilitating meaningful employee engagement has become a ubiquitous challenge as a result of the pandemic. These challenges have required engagement to evolve in a way that prioritizes the health and wellbeing of employees to a higher degree than ever before. Engaged employees are individuals that feel connected to their organization and its goals, and this definition also includes the awareness and utilization of employee benefits that support individual wellbeing needs. Integrated benefit portals with regularly updated personalized content and communications may be the key to helping your team engage with their employer sponsored benefits. Most employees do not fully understand the fundamentals of their plans and perks. This often results in unutilized benefits, unnecessary out of pocket costs for employees, losses in productivity, and additional time costs for employer People teams. Informed employees tend to make better use of employer-sponsored resources to benefit their lives. This typically leads to better overall engagement and satisfaction within the workplace. Having an organized and consistent year-round approach is essential for supporting engagement surrounding employee benefits that can help take your team to the next level.

Many employees lead busy lives, often supported by myriad individual benefit vendors that offer services or tools to aid in daily life and tasks when used. Time and effort can be significant barriers on the way to consistent engagement. Centralized benefit portals (like HealthJoy) tend to help keep things organized so that separate benefits are tracked and accessed through a single dashboard. Having everything in one place can be a significant motivating convenience for engagement and benefit use among employees. Personalized content, employer specific Virtual Benefit fairs, and year-round incentives for benefit education (like on Airbo) can also help employees thrive. Personalized content can be much more engaging as it tends to be more relevant to the individual employee’s needs. For example, it can be very helpful to be able to see your required copay for an appointment and your available HSA funds within the same dashboard. Virtual benefit fairs are also a fantastic way to offer year-round guidance on the variety of benefits available to a specific team member.

Improving your employee engagement will require a strategic and forward-thinking approach. The new year is an opportune time to start formulating an enhanced employee engagement strategy for the year ahead. With adequate planning, it becomes even more possible to provide ongoing employee education around existing and new benefit offerings introduced to the team. If you are interested in solutions that drive employee engagement for your next open enrollment cycle in 2022, please reach out to our team of Newfront benefit consultants to start planning.