Benefits support employees year-round, yet benefits communication tends to be concentrated around open enrollment. To maximize employee use of your benefits package, it’s important to communicate benefit offerings often. Follow this guide for best practices when developing and implementing an employee benefits communication plan.
What Is Employee Benefits Communication?
Employee benefits communication is the ongoing process of educating and engaging employees about the organization’s total compensation package. It ensures employees understand what benefits are available and how to use them.
Why Benefits Communication Matters
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, benefits account for 29.7% of total employer compensation costs. With benefits amounting to nearly a third of employer compensation costs, it’s important to invest in promoting them. A strong benefits communication strategy increases your benefits spend ROI in the following ways:
Increases Employee Engagement with Benefits
Clear, timely communication drives greater participation in health plans, retirement savings, wellness programs, and voluntary benefits. Higher engagement not only helps employees make better financial and healthcare decisions, but also increases the perceived value of the employer’s investment in benefits.
Reduces Open Enrollment Questions
MetLife data shows 43% of employees don’t fully understand their benefits, while 72% want their employer to provide benefit communications that are tailored to their needs.
“We’re at a crossroads where employees recognize the value of benefits, yet many still don’t fully understand what’s being offered,” says Todd Katz, head of Group Benefits at MetLife. “This is a moment for employers to rethink how benefits and wellness programs are positioned — leveraging benefit communications, tools and resources to ensure employees feel supported to make informed decisions that improve employee sentiment and ultimately drive stronger workplace outcomes.”
A proactive employee benefits awareness strategy helps employees find answers without needing to contact HR. By addressing common questions early and providing information throughout the year, organizations can reduce administrative burden while creating a smoother enrollment experience.
Strengthens Employee Retention
MetLife data shows employees who understand and are satisfied with their benefits are 1.4 times more likely to feel engaged and 1.2 times more likely to be productive at work. This leads to improved retention. In fact, nearly 75% of employers say their benefits program makes a positive impact on recruiting, retention, and employee performance, according to Employee Benefits Research Institute data.
Common Benefits Communication Challenges
The most common challenges workplaces face when communicating benefits to employees include:
- Low awareness: Benefits get introduced once at onboarding or open enrollment, and rarely come up again. By the time someone needs a benefit, they’ve forgotten it exists.
- Information overload: Employees are asked to absorb an entire year’s worth of benefits information at once. Faced with that volume, many default to re-enrolling in whatever they had before or disengage entirely.
- One-size-fits-all messaging: A single, generic message sent to the whole workforce rarely resonates. Life stage, role, and communication preferences all shape what employees read and act on.
- No year-round engagement: Communication often stops the moment open enrollment closes, leaving employees without reminders when life events, such as a birth, marriage, or move, change what benefits they need or how to use them.
Benefits Communication Channels and Methods
Strong benefits communication requires an omnichannel approach to resonate with a diverse mix of employees. Channels to use include:
- Email: Works best for detailed, referenceable information like plan documents, eligibility changes, and enrollment deadlines. An email gives employees something to revisit later, though messages can easily get buried during high-volume periods like open enrollment.
- Text messaging: Send a text to deliver time-sensitive nudges, like an approaching deadline or a benefit about to expire, directly to employees. Text messages typically garner higher open rates than email, making them ideal for short, urgent reminders rather than detailed explanations.
- Intranet or benefits portal: A benefits portal serves as a centralized, self-serve hub for plan summaries, FAQs, and enrollment tools. Employees can return to it on their own time, which makes it a strong supporting reference.
- In-person or live sessions: Benefits fairs, lunch-and-learns, and manager-led meetings give employees the chance to ask questions in real time. These formats are especially valuable for complex or unfamiliar benefits, though they’re harder to scale across a remote or distributed workforce.
- Manager communication: Managers often field an employee’s first questions about a benefit, particularly for hourly or deskless workers who may not check email regularly. Equipping them with simple talking points extends HR’s reach without requiring extra formal outreach.
- Video and short-form content: Short videos simplify dense or unfamiliar benefits, like how an HSA works, in a format that’s easy to digest. This approach tends to resonate especially well with employees who prefer visual content over reading a document.
How to Build an Effective Benefits Communication Strategy
Still wondering how to communicate employee benefits? Follow these steps.
Set Goals
Decide what your communication strategy needs to accomplish. Goals can be based on improving awareness, increasing benefit utilization, or reducing benefits administration time. Ensure your goals are measurable, so you can improve your communication strategy over time.
Build a Year-Round Communication Calendar
Map out a year-round communication calendar so benefits stay visible outside of the enrollment window. Tie touchpoints to moments employees are already thinking about, like financial planning at the start of the year, wellness programs in the summer, or dependent care reminders around back-to-school season.
Segment Your Audience
Segment the audience by demographics, job type, or life stage to keep messaging relevant. For example, younger employees may respond best to messaging about student loan assistance or building an emergency fund through an HSA, while employees closer to retirement are more likely to engage with content on 401(k) catch-up contributions or long-term care coverage.
Employees going through a specific life event, like a new parent or someone recently married, benefit from targeted messaging about updating dependents, adjusting FSA elections, or enrolling in parental leave.
Work with your vendors to personalize further. Health benefit vendors often have communication tactics based on claims data. For example, they could identify employees who haven’t visited a doctor in 12 or more months and send them an annual screening reminder, or flag employees with A1C-related claims to communicate a relevant diabetes management program.
Launch Messaging
Define the right channel mix based on your workforce. Office-based employees who are at a computer most of the day are easy to reach through email and an intranet portal. For drivers, warehouse staff, or other deskless employees, consider text messaging for time-sensitive reminders. Use printed materials or posters in common areas.
Train Managers to Communicate Benefits
Managers are often an employee’s first stop with a basic benefits question, especially for employees who don’t interact with HR regularly. Equip managers with talking points to cover benefits basics during team huddles or check-ins.
You can’t expect your managers to be benefits experts. Provide them with a one-page reference guide to use when employees come to them with questions.
Benefits Communication Best Practices
How you communicate your benefits message matters. Follow these best practices:
- Avoid insurance and benefits jargon. Terms like “coinsurance” or “actuarial value” are second nature to HR teams but unfamiliar to most employees.
- Be consistent across channels. Employees should get the same answer whether they check an email, the intranet, or ask their manager.
- Make it easy to ask questions. Dedicated HR office hours or a benefits helpline give employees a clear, low-friction way to get answers.
- Use real employee stories or examples. Abstract benefits become tangible when employees can see how a coworker used a program.
- Communicate changes proactively. Employees should hear about a plan change, a new carrier, or an updated policy from their employer directly.
How to Measure Benefits Communication Effectiveness
Track whether the strategy is working using data like intranet and email engagement data, benefits utilization rates by plan type, and open enrollment completion rates and timing.
While enrollment data is helpful, pulse surveys provide real-time feedback on benefits awareness and satisfaction. Checking in with employees between enrollment periods to see whether benefits communication is landing helps increase benefit utilization and makes for a smoother enrollment process.
How Paycor Supports Employee Benefits Communication
Paycor Benefits Administration Software guides employees through benefits election, both at open enrollment and for life changes, via Paycor’s self-service portal. Ask Emma, our intelligent and user-friendly decision support guide, offers users real-time support, AI-powered insights, and personalized recommendations.
Ready to improve the benefits experience for both benefits administrators and employees? Check out our benefits administration guide.