We all start the new year out with the best intentions – drink more water, exercise more and get involved in the community. For those in the benefits profession, it also likely includes a goal around better engaging employees with their benefits package during the relevant moments that make up someone’s life – the moments that matter.
As with any important goal in life, one of the most critical things you can do to set yourself up for success is to start with creating an actual game plan. When you invest the time to start with the end in mind and write out your action items with target dates, it becomes much easier to stay on track when the day-to-day chaos inevitably starts to invade.
There is so much potential in the arena of creating better benefit consumers through increasing our employees’ health literacy and raising their awareness around total rewards, but you cannot do it overnight. That’s why you may find it useful to organize your ideas into quarterly themes, monthly focus areas and meaningful communication touchpoints. This structure provides such a great outline when aiming to engage a multi-generational workforce.
Plus, we all know that benefits are not one-size-fits-all and the same applies to benefits engagement. For each month, strive to have a variety of communication tactics and different benefit promotions so that every employee has the opportunity to connect with at least one touchpoint.
Here’s a process you can work through along with some helpful tips as you embark upon the path of designing your own year-round benefits engagement calendar.
Quarterly Themes
For quarterly themes, it may be useful to align with your company's benefit catalog categories of health, wealth and lifestyle, dedicating the final quarter to all three areas for open enrollment. As you designate each quarter to one of the areas of total well-being, try to incorporate some creativity. Benefits do not have to be boring!
With that in mind, craft a statement or tagline that represents the overall theme. Here are some examples of quarterly themes and taglines:
- Q1: Wealth – Kick off the New Year by Planning for the Future Today!
- Q2: Health – Spring into Action with Your Health & Total Well-Being!
- Q3: Lifestyle – See Your Year as Half Full & Invest in Yourself Today!
- Q4: Open Enrollment – Celebrating The Whole YOU!
Monthly Focus Areas and Touchpoints
Many different organizations promote health awareness months and they provide great ideas and resources for communication campaigns. For example, here's WebMD's 2024 Health Observances. And here's Your 12 Month Guide to Keeping Employee Benefits Front and Center!
These are great resources to get started, but another great practice is to engage with your carriers and benefit vendors to see what monthly campaigns or communication toolkits they have to offer their employer groups.
The most effective approach may be to pull from a variety of sources and identify ways to connect the monthly focus areas and awareness communications to the different components of our benefits package. This could include promoting new products you're launching that quarter or highlighting the advantages of company-sponsored benefits.
Remember, the overall objective of designing this year-round engagement calendar is to help employees better understand, utilize and maximize the potential of their benefits package. So, here’s to creative planning and better employee engagement!
Explore more best practices in our Warm Up for OE Employee Benefits Enrollment & Engagement Playbook.
