Employees Don’t Know Jack About Their Benefits

Note from Lance: Back when I was rocking Windows 98 and a bowl cut, one of my favorite PC games of all time was You Don’t Know Jack (YDKJ). It is essentially a trivia game but with as much snark and irreverent humor as my little CD-ROM drive could handle. The guys that did YDKJ are back and are figuring out better ways to communicate with employees. Check this out.

Employees don’t know jack about their benefits. They really don’t. But first, a quick bit of history to get you in the mood. In the 1940s employers began offering health insurance to their employees as a way to be more competitive when the US government imposed a war-time freeze on wages, and since then benefits plans have been getting exponentially more complicated. And hemlines, well they’ve gotten more complicated too, but that’s for a different post.

The problem is that benefits communications haven’t caught up with the complexity of plans; leaving legions of employees (at least two-thirds by most accounts) flat out bewildered when it comes to their benefits. Even with all the “flashy” comparison charts and 5 color brochures, people still don’t get that socking money away in an FSA is just about a sure fire way to save nearly 30% .

When your employees aren’t properly educated on their benefits

• You lose out on the FICA tax savings of elective benefit participation
• You have a harder time retaining top talent
• They are less engaged
• They aren’t as productive as they could be
• An angel loses its wings

From our years spent developing hit interactive games like YOU DON’T KNOW JACK we learned a simple but powerful lesson: If people aren’t engaged they won’t learn. With that in mind, here are a few ideas we humbly present on how to make benefits communications work a little better.

People Prefer Plain English

Which example below is more likely to be understood by all of your employees?

1. Beyond the basic benefit, both individual and spouse buy-up options are available. Please note: an election of voluntary life coverage for a spouse can equal up to half your individual life buy-up, although depending on the desired level of coverages, EOI may be required.
2. The company is going to buy some life insurance for you. If you want, you can buy extra. Whatever extra life insurance you buy for yourself, you can also buy up to half that amount for your spouse. Now, depending on how much additional insurance you’d like, one or both of you may need to answer some questions about your health to see if you qualify for it.

If you picked 1 – stop messing with me. It’s not nice.

To get from 1 to 2, try hiring a writer that isn’t a benefits expert. Look for a writer that knows how to tell a good story and gets to the point without relying on the jargon that’s permeated your ears for decades.

Employees want to spend as little time and effort as possible to come to the best benefits decisions

Your employees don’t want to be experts in benefits. They want to race cars on the Autobahn or walk along an exotic beach hand-in-hand with George Clooney. So it helps to get to the point as quickly as possible, and throwing in a little humor every once in a while couldn’t possibly be harmful. Even your attorneys like to laugh, even if they do it in secret when nobody’s watching.

Everyone’s an individual

Darcy in accounts payable is pregnant, Jeff in finance is diabetic, and Parker your new 22-year old analyst barely thinks about his health, much less his health insurance. How can a single benefits manual meet the educational needs of all three of these people? Don’t expect people to leaf through pages and pages of personally irrelevant information; they’ll end up giving up before getting to the good stuff. Instead, break up your educational materials based on certain triggers that matter most to your benefits plans. Put together a one pager on pregnancy and how your plans treat it, same with managed diseases, and maybe even one for the “young invincibles”.

If you’d like to learn more about benefits communications from the Creators of YOU DON’T KNOW JACK, you can download our eBook here or visit us at www.jellyvisionbenefitscounselor.com. Oh, and you can totally email me too (lindsay [at] jellyvision.com). Oooh oooh, or fax me! That would be fun! Now where is that fax number . . . .