Helping Employees Help Themselves: Driving Awareness and Utilization of Your Benefits Program

You may offer a world-class benefits package—but if employees don't understand or engage with what's available, it won't move the needle on wellbeing, retention, or productivity. n this session, HR and benefits leaders will share strategies to ensure your workforce understands what's available, how to access it, and why it matters. From creative year-round communication to personalized outreach and tech-enabled tools, learn how to clearly convey the value of your offerings and drive meaningful engagement across all employee groups.


Transcription:

Stephanie Koch (00:10):

All right. Good morning. Hope you guys had a great morning. I know the sessions that we've sat through have been so enlightening. As a Director of Human Resources, and I've been in HR about 30 years, I want to talk about my vulnerability for a second and really coming to the conclusion that it's very difficult to connect with your employees when you have a huge benefit program. So this particular session really resonated with me. When they asked me to moderate, I was very excited because these organizations have such amazing information to share. We're going to try to leave time for Q and A at the end. As I said, I'm Stephanie Koch, I'm the Director of Human Resources for Hendry Marine Industries, and I'd love to have each of the panelists introduce themselves, and then we can kick off with the questions.

Eric Silverman (01:10):

No, ladies first.

Jennifer Campe (01:12):

Okay. My name's Jennifer Campe. I work with Allstate Identity Protection as well as Allstate, the parent company, with a few other business units. I've been a CHRO for a couple of public and private companies, and similar to Stephanie, I've been in HR about 35 years.

Lindsey Garito (01:31):

Hi everyone. Lindsey Garito. I've been in HR for over 20 years. I'm currently the Assistant Vice President of Total Rewards at Montefiore Einstein. We're a large academic health system in New York. I oversee our employee health and wellbeing team, and we support over 24,000 employees.

Matthew Lopez (01:52):

I am Matt Lopez, I lead the benefits team for FanDuel. I've been in benefits for about 20 years. I am in my 15% discomfort zone, as we learned this morning. Let's do this, but happy to be here.

Eric Silverman (02:04):

I'll take his 85% on the other side. I'm Eric, same guy you met earlier. I am an Employee Benefit Advisor, 25 years. I own and run my own firm based out of Baltimore and have about 15 W2 employees across the country. We are a marketing communication and employee engagement enrollment firm.

Stephanie Koch (02:26):

Well, this is going to be a great conversation, and we're going to kick it off by asking, what is the biggest reason employees don't engage with benefits today? Is it lack of awareness, complexity, or competing priorities? We'll start with Jennifer.

Jennifer Campe (02:44):

So I think one thing that we all know intuitively, but maybe we're not cognizant of during the process, is employees aren't making these decisions in a vacuum. They're making it amidst all these other decisions they're making in their life. Right now, with really turbulent times and lots of things for employees to consider—the market's gone up, it's gone down, what are tariffs going to do—there is a lot of turbulence. So you have employees having real decision fatigue, and it's a big financial decision. I wonder sometimes if our employees look at their benefits and take a sort of a set it and forget it approach. The good news is I think they trust us, but the flip side is I wonder if they look at their benefits occasionally and say, "I'll just do what I did last year. I'll roll over. It's a passive enrollment." I worry about that a little bit because I think there are these sort of new and novel circumstances, threats that they have to really think about every single year. So I think from my perspective, one of the biggest issues is just wallet share, certainly because it's getting more expensive, and decision fatigue.

Stephanie Koch (03:50):

Yeah, great point. Lindsey.

Lindsey Garito (03:54):

I think for such a long time, benefits were very transactional. To your point, it was kind of set it and forget it. You heard about it as a new hire. You heard about it maybe once a year at annual open enrollment. So it was just very transactional for employees. It was a check-the-box exercise that they did at enrollment to make sure they had coverage, set it and forget it with their retirement plan contribution. I think it's really changed in recent time, and that's because of leaders just like all of us and spending time at great events like this where we get together and learn from one another and look for ways to continue evolving and adapting what we're doing and changing that narrative. We need to think about it as, "Do we create something where employees want to engage in their benefits?" When we reframe it that way, we can look at it differently.

Stephanie Koch (04:45):

I love the fact that you talked about evolving because I know with benefits, they can't be stagnant. They have to keep evolving. You have to keep finding new ways to engage the workforce, or else they're just going to expect it's the same. In most cases, it's not. So Matt, what about you?

Matthew Lopez (05:03):

I think all of us can think of this as an all-of-the-above type of answer, but just to pick on one

just awareness. Awareness is usually our first challenge to tackle. We're not just competing with the day-to-day competing priorities, of course, but we're competing for their attention. We're not the only departments that are emailing employees, sending messages. You have business updates, learning and development. There are other departments within HR competing for attention, so you deal with saturation, oversaturation. Really just making them aware. Sometimes it's not that they don't care about benefits, it's just they don't see them. If you think about everything that they're getting from a communication standpoint, some things are just lost. So I think if you can start with awareness, you can chip away at complexity, personalization. From there, it really starts with that first initial hurdle.

Stephanie Koch (05:50):

Those are great points. From our perspective, we're a shipyard at the Port of Tampa, and with 300 employees, 80% of them being men, most of the time we're realizing we have to engage with the spouses in order to get the employees more engaged. So it's a work in process. From your experience, what are the most common misconceptions employees have about their benefits? Matt, we're going to start with you.

Matthew Lopez (06:18):

Well, I think Lindsey kind of mentioned it. It's the thought process of benefits are very rational. You think about it once a year at open enrollment or when HR says it's time, but we work very heavily in making it a year-round destination or year-round resources. When you think about mental health, financial literacy, this is more than, "Hey, my tooth hurts, and now I need to look up my dental coverage." We need to make it a destination where people can look at the resources year-round. I did 10 minutes of breathing exercises in the speaker room that I learned from my EAP, not just when I needed it, being proactive. I think that's a mindset, the behavior change or shift that we have to continue down, is making this a proactive approach to benefits.

Stephanie Koch (07:00):

Absolutely. It is definitely ongoing. It doesn't stop. Lindsey, what about you?

Lindsey Garito (07:06):

I would say a misconception is that employees don't view themselves as consumers, that they don't treat benefits as something that they are purchasing, that they are buying, that they have decision power on. Most of us probably offer some form of options and choices that they can make. I think that there's a shift happening. We're seeing it a little bit, and we also have some responsibility to help them with that in terms of how can they make the best decisions possible, choose the right benefits for them, and have them own that a little bit.

Stephanie Koch (07:38):

Eric, from your experience, what are the most common misconceptions employees have about their benefits?

Eric Silverman (07:46):

I always take a step back and look at it from a bigger global picture. It's sad but true that the average American family spends more time researching the big screen TV they want to buy—already on sale, on sale again, and then on sale again on Black Friday. A month before Black Friday, they still haven't made their purchase, they're still researching, and then they finally pull the trigger. A week after Black Friday, it goes on sale again, and they get money back from Best Buy. That's the effort and level people put into that big screen TV. Who would agree? They don't do anything close to that when it comes to benefits. As you hit the nail on the head earlier, we have to empower folks to become true consumers of healthcare. How do you do that? We'll get into it more with these questions, but the reality that works very well is, and it's an old bad expression I didn't make up, but my mom used to say, Chinese water torture.

(08:44):

I mean, you just have to drip various bits of information on folks constantly throughout the year. We're not in 1999, we're not in 2003 anymore. Benefits need should and have to be a year-round communication process. What I've found is big screen TVs are fun and exciting; benefits are boring. How do you communicate and engage? How do you not literally, but figuratively, grab the employee and their family members—their spouse, their mom or dad, if they're young—how do you pull them by the shirt collar and get them excited? Well, you have to bring in benefits that are probably going to be more exciting to the average person. The easiest one that we use as a tool to garner excitement, believe it or not, good, bad or indifferent, is pet benefits. More than half the population has a pet. When you wrap a marketing campaign for engagement around pet benefits and you naturally steer your employee population to whatever enrollment tool you're using, what happens is, as night follows day, they're engaged. They're there for pets, but while they're there, typically they end up getting quotes and learning about more important things. No offense to pet lovers, I love pets and there are dogs here, but the reality is what about the humans? It's just not as exciting to talk about disability, life, dental, and medical as it is for somebody to say, "I need to get a quote for Fluffy for pet insurance." So you have to do things that are a little unique and different, just to kind of like a song has a good hook. You've got to hook them in that capacity.

Stephanie Koch (10:17):

It's really interesting.

Jennifer Campe (10:18):

Yeah, I was just going to add one more. I think the biggest misconception, at least from my perspective, is that our employees understand their benefits. Often I don't think it's so complex for them, and I think they have a really difficult time sort of forecasting their own need, forecasting the financials related to it. I'm not a benefit specialist, let's be uber clear about that, but I think everyone on this panel is so close to the details that occasionally I wonder if we should take our benefits and sort of run it through the GENCA test. Does your average person who's not a benefit specialist, does this really resonate? Because we have to remember also our brokers are writing communications for us. So I think we have to sort of click it down to maybe make it a little more comprehensible to our employees. I find often they don't even understand what they have.

Stephanie Koch (11:09):

Yeah, it's interesting when you think about the terms that we're familiar with

deductible, co-insurance, things that we work with every day that are common speak for us, but to someone who's not in benefits, it's Greek. So you're transitioning us to the next question

measuring whether your workforce truly does understand how to access their benefits, not just that they exist. So Matt, do you want to kick us off and talk about that?

Matthew Lopez (11:44):

Yeah, so I think we kind of look at it in layers. ROI is hard to judge if you don't give it two years. So how do you judge engagement initially? It's really participation, but within layers, are they getting in the door? Are they registering for what particular program that you're looking at? And then from there, diving deeper, partnering with your point solutions to figure out, okay, what's the recidivism or the return use, session length? Digging deeper into finding out the behaviors that they're actually using the tool and understanding versus just registering and then setting and leaving it along the way. Really digging into the data and understanding what those behaviors are, how they're using the tool. Another thing we do is we really take heart in our engagement surveys and reading the comments and understanding what questions they're asking. Has it shifted from "how do I access my benefits?" to more detailed questions within that particular program? So you can see that evolution of understanding and the questions that they're asking as well.

Stephanie Koch (12:42):

Yeah, that's great. I think you brought up a good point, and it was discussed earlier that we can't make an assumption after six months when we roll out a new benefit. If we're not getting the utilization that we expect, that it's not working. It really does take time for adoption. Lindsey, what about you?

Lindsey Garito (13:01):

I think utilization rates are always a great starting point, and even if you're not very far along on your journey of engagement, utilization rate can be a great place to start. That at least demonstrates to you how many employees have started or are actively utilizing a benefit. To be clear, utilization doesn't equal effectiveness. So it doesn't mean that a benefit or a program is effective, but it'll at least give you a starting point to see where you need to go in terms of communication engagement

is this something that's resonating with employees? I think when we talk about measuring, it can be both quantitative and qualitative. So looking at communications, for example, if an employee comes and says, and it happens all the time, "Oh, I didn't know that we had this benefit," or "I didn't know about this," and you kind of say to yourself, "We sent five emails," that signals to me that for some reason the emails weren't working. Or at least for some, it wasn't the most effective communication point. Maybe we need to look at something a little bit different to reach and connect with employees.

Stephanie Koch (14:08):

Definitely. Jennifer, measuring.

Jennifer Campe (14:14):

Not a lot to add. I mean it's utilization, it's looking at all the stats. I wonder sometimes though, if there's an opportunity for benefits to view itself almost in light of, you have a change management program, and you've got a group of informal stakeholders who are out there in the organization, plugged in to what people are hearing, and even gathering anecdotal information about whether people really understand the benefits. But I think beyond that, and that's part of the subjective, all the objective would be gathering all the utilization stats.

Stephanie Koch (14:49):

I love that kind of identifying people to become a champion of some of the benefit programs and really having them help drive the interest that this is what the company is offering, and it's very valuable.

Jennifer Campe (15:05):

And relaying it in layman's terms. Right, exactly.

Stephanie Koch (15:10):

Absolutely. Eric, what about you? Measuring whether a workforce truly understands how to access the benefits?

Eric Silverman (15:18):

Yeah, I think the key that we've found for garnering engagement is to double down on not just what employees should be doing as true consumers of healthcare and where they should be going, but where not to go as well. So when we're communicating effectively, for instance, a self-funded medical plan, or if we're trying to re-engage and make sure people are knowing about their EAP program for their family and such, we spend a lot of time focused and effort on what not to do. We've done AB testing, beta testing quite often, and we're always doing it. We're finding more engagement is when we do the top five things not to do vis-a-vis text message, the top 10 things not to do, and we'll list three of them on the text and click here to hear the rest. We're able to steer the employees to the more effective, low-cost, high-quality provider when it comes to the medical benefits in addition to any other benefit we're trying to push.

(16:19):

So from an engagement perspective, it was interesting to find that more responses and more engagement and more click-through on the site was when you do kind of that countdown. So if you're doing takeaways, try that as well as showing people what not to do. I think it's overwhelming when people just continue to hear, "Here's what you should be doing," as opposed to what they're not. Let's just face it, we're all humans. Most people are probably doing what we're not supposed to do anyway, so they want to check that list and see, "Wait, am I on that not-to-do list?" So give that a shot, and I think you're going to see it work wonders.

Stephanie Koch (16:59):

Well, you're kind of transitioning into the next question, which is great, but I suspect you're going to have more information to add to this question, and it's about benefits as a subject matter is overwhelming. We all understand that. So how do you simplify that information that's so complex into relevant and digestible pieces for employees?

Eric Silverman (17:25):

Me?

Stephanie Koch (17:26):

Yes.

Eric Silverman (17:26):

So we use a ton of humor with our messaging, and we use our good buddy ChatGPT to help for that. We did it on our own. I was chief humor expert of that, and it was not easy, but I tried my best, and we did very well. Now chat says, "Hold my beer," and does it for me quicker and better every time. We just have fun with it. Obviously, with your permission, if you're the head of human resources or an executive of some sort, we will consistently throughout the year, not every day, but once a month or so, message employees, and whatever topic it is, we'll tie it into something happening throughout the year. If it's October, we'll tie it into, "Hey, respond to this message, we want to take note of what your favorite candy bar is." They think that it's going to be some type of campaign where HR is going to send them their favorite candy or whatever, and a lot of times you will, but really we're doing it to—what are we trying to do?

(18:21):

Grab their attention, pull them in. So we will talk about their candy bar, "Hey, what's better, Snickers or Reese's, settle the debate." And then the next line will be like, "Don't forget we have this and this. Top three reasons why you should do that or not do that." Again, if you have the right data set, we can track it on the backend, which data is everything. Anybody would agree. So when I can show my human resource client professionals the data that says, "Hey, we just did this fun thing about candy," I'm just making this up, and I can say, "Here, the engagement went through the roof," as opposed to two months ago when we did something about dental insurance, nobody cared, right? So play with it, have fun. If it's not your personality, get over it, because it's going to work when it comes to getting your population involved. Yes, exactly what the from Google said.

Stephanie Koch (19:10):

Yep. I have to know though, because I love ChatGPT myself. Can you give us an example of what you might use ChatGPT for to create engagement?

Eric Silverman (19:22):

I mean obviously you guys, I shouldn't say obviously, most of you have probably used it, that or Gronk or any of—there's so many competitors now, it doesn't matter which one you're using. I find they all to be relatively the same for what I use it for. Just speak to it like you're speaking to your buddy, and just say, "I'm trying to write a text to a population of this demographic. They have 10,000 employees," or "we just did, or they have 50 employees," whatever it is, and we want to get them excited. "I'd like to tie in Halloween, I want to talk about something fun, and by the way, I want to remind them about something else." Should have said it earlier, but a lot of times, Halloween wise, we would tie it into candy and then say, "Don't forget, go in network for your dental." Right? We're tying the cavities thing together. So my best advice I ever received, I'm no chat expert, is type into chat the way you would talk to your friend, and the more loose and fun you are, it's going to respond accordingly.

Stephanie Koch (20:15):

It also gets to know you. Like you said, it's your beer now.

Eric Silverman (20:20):

It's a little creepy, but I love it. Embrace it.

Stephanie Koch (20:23):

Yes. Yeah, it's really awesome. Okay, so this is for Eric and Lindsey. What year-round communication strategies have you found most effective in keeping benefits top of mind outside of open enrollment? And with that in mind, how do you tailor messaging to different employee demographics? So you have remote workers, frontline staff, multiple generations. So Lindsey,

Lindsey Garito (20:54):

We start at the time of hire. So we are starting right off the bat when our employees attend orientation. We in total rewards have a dedicated one-hour time slot where our team will present and share about our benefits, our wellbeing programs, how to access and utilize their benefits. We have a newsletter, so we leverage a newsletter to share information once a month and get that out to employees. A big thing for me that we do currently and that has worked in other organizations as well is connecting to what's going on in the year. Similar to what you were just saying, there's always some type of awareness month or awareness week or event that you can utilize to pull together what benefits and programs and resources that you have and use that as a communication and an engagement point. It's National Suicide Awareness Month.

(21:51):

There's also Mental Health Awareness Month. Those, for example, are opportunities to pull together your EAP, mental health benefits, and share those with employees, make sure that they know who they are, how to call them, how to access them, how many visits or sessions that they get, and utilize those events throughout the year to build your communication and engagement strategy. We just did for Financial Literacy Month, a whole month where we did a calendar of events, virtual sessions, in-person, onsite events. We had a fair where we brought in eight to 10 different benefit partners that we work with to be onsite. We are healthcare, so most of our employees are not at a computer for most of the day, if not at all. So for us, in-person interactions is really the top way that we get to reach people. That was a really great event, and we made sure to be really thoughtful about the content and thinking that we do have different groups in the workforce.

(22:50):

I like to think of it through the lens of life stages versus generations. Are we sharing content that will reach everyone no matter where they are in their financial journey at this point in life? So everything from how to start a budget to tackling credit card debt to home ownership, and then of course, all the way to retirement savings. That was a really great opportunity for us to engage with employees, talk about our benefits, get them out there, get our actual vendor partners in front of employees, and it was really well received.

Stephanie Koch (23:25):

That's excellent. The whole throughout the year thing is so important and the different varieties of how we have to communicate based on the workforce. Eric, what about you? Year-round communication strategies you found most effective? You work with a lot of different companies.

Eric Silverman (23:43):

Sure, sure. The average employer that when I meet them for the first time or if they're even existing clients, when I met them for the first time, they say that their only primary communication tool is email. I ask them typically, "Do all your employees, maybe it's a construction company, do they all get an issued email?" More than half the time they say, "No, no, they don't sit at a computer all day." "Okay, great." Then they'll say, "And we have language barriers." "Great." So when you're emailing half the population that has an email, and you're not emailing half the people that don't have an email, or they give you their old AOL account when they first come aboard as a new hire, we've been there, we've seen it. Guys, are you communicating in Spanish or Mandarin or whatever it might be?

(24:29):

The answer I get? Take a guess. "No, no, we'd love to, but no." So I think you have to communicate in the manner that needs to be communicated. Let's just be honest, everybody in this room has probably sent and received more text messages this morning than you have emails, and you probably have more unread emails from work—I get it, me too—than you do text, because there's something psychological about seeing the little red dot for text messages on your phone that freaks you out. OCD kicks in, and every one of us is just like our employees, and we want it to be read, and we want to see who's messaging, "Ooh, what is that?" Right? Very few of you probably have unread messages, or very many, as opposed to if we did a blind check and said, "Let's see your email," you would have hundreds or some of you thousands, if you're that person, of unread emails.

(25:18):

So communicate the way that your employees and their family need and want to be communicated with, the same way that you do. People have voicemail anxiety, people have phone anxiety. People are now having email anxiety. Text is not there yet. People love to text. So use that to your advantage. The other thing is, when it comes to communicating, we do a lot of check-ins. So we'll send out a mass message to a thousand employees in a certain demographic for our clients—we're on board, it's a partnership, they're helping us write it, and we're finalizing it—but we'll send something to the effect of, "Hey Joe, just checking in on you. How's everything going? Text back, I want to know." Some people will see through it a little bit, but believe it or not, more than half the population statistically responds to your text.

(26:04):

We have an open communication line. It's interesting because the response I get from human resource professionals quite often is, "We don't have the labor and resources to keep up with that. If we send it out and everybody responds, how are we going to keep up?" You don't have to. That's what a firm like myself is for. There are plenty out there that will do it, but that's how you really dig in and build relationships with your employee population. Stop just sending them messages and tell them to click. Ask them to reply on the two-way message and genuinely show compassion and interest. You will be absolutely blown away with what they share, and everything we can't help with, but we will then triage whatever response we get over to the human resource department and say, "Hey, I think you might want to take this one and give them a call or reach out because they're having a challenge with their dental or vision or healthcare," or whatever it is.

(26:53):

"Or they're having a problem with mental health, and they sent a lot more than they probably should have, but you guys should know this, and let's reach out as human-to-human contact." That is how you build loyalty within your organization, and we help our clients do that. Certainly, I don't know about you, but most HR departments that we meet and have as clients tell us—and this is clients we have that are 10,000 plus employees too—it's a small department. It's a department of one or two or three or four if they're lucky. They just can't keep up with the bandwidth. So they appreciate our ability to reach out on their behalf and personalize it. So the more personal the better.

Stephanie Koch (27:28):

I completely agree, and I love the triaging when an employee has a particular issue. Typically, like Eric said, our departments are kind of small, and we don't always have the bandwidth to respond to everyone's individual needs. So having a partner like that is extremely valuable. So we have a few minutes left. I'm curious, I'm going to pull the audience, even though it's not scripted here. How many of you have a communication strategy or something that we didn't talk about that you want to share with the rest of us so we can all learn something else?

(28:07):

Yes.

(28:24):

Yeah, I love the "Did you know?" I do find that that's very helpful. I don't know about the rest of the panel, but I can guarantee that a lot of the spouses of my own employees probably have no idea.

(28:38):

That, for example, we have an onsite primary care clinic to treat our employees and their dependents that are covered on the plan. I just wonder who doesn't know about it. So

Eric Silverman (28:51):

Steph, can I touch on that real quick?

Stephanie Koch (28:52):

Yeah.

Eric Silverman (28:53):

So I love that, and we do that. It's amazing. Take it a step further if you're not already. Right? It depends on your company culture and executives saying yes or no, they like the idea, but more often than not, we get blessings from our clients where we'll message the emergency contacts that are listed on file in the employee system for payroll or navigator or whatever system they're using, and we will open it up with—this is something to the effect, chat will help you, trust me—but spitballing something to the effect of, "Hey, and it's personalized. Hey Nancy, you're listed as an emergency contact for so-and-so. This is the human resource department. Wanted to let you know it's open enrollment. We have some exciting benefits," and you can have jokes with it. "In our experience, not every spouse, significant other, or mom or dad, or whoever it is, is aware that this is happening.

(29:38):

Please bug them when they get home from work today." We get responses from spouses and moms and dads of younger populations all the time with just big bold capital letters, "Thank you. I had no idea. What do you mean it ends tomorrow?" Right? So yes, postcards, but do a one-two combo. It works so well. Yes, you're going to have—this is going to come up—"Well, what about if it's not the emergency contact anymore? What if they didn't update it? What if they got a divorce?" Yeah, it happens, but it allows us to update our data to relay back to our HR contacts to say, "Hey, we got these 18 messages back. No, that's not the emergency contact anymore. We might want to update the file." Again, data is king, or claims.

Stephanie Koch (30:21):

Workflow. Absolutely. All right, Heather, we have a question.

Audience Member 1 (30:28):

We created a Total Rewards Slack channel that everyone gets added to. Mostly everyone gets added to upon hire, and that's where we do a lot of our campaigning. So we're sending messages out weekly, sort of the same type of thing

"Did you remember to do this? Are you aware of this benefit?" So just a nice way to get that flash, right? People are always going to check it. They don't have to respond or do anything, but it helps just get people to remember. We get a lot of people saying like, "Wow, I didn't realize you have that second vision pair benefit. Thanks for sharing that." So just the small things, and then often try to campaign it to those monthly events, like if it's suicide prevention awareness and those types of things. So definitely try to move away from email because everyone hates email and will not read it. They halfway already don't read your messages. But the Slack we found very effective for our organization. Yeah.

Jennifer Campe (31:22):

I love that, related to the idea that sometimes employees listen to their peers more than they'll listen to the HR department or someone else. We have seen a lot of employees launch the benefits, and it sits actually at Allstate, sort of the parent company, and we found employees really helping each other on Slack, even if it was information that we in the background knew as an HR organization, we told them five times already. For whatever reason, it stuck the sixth time when it came from a peer, which was fabulous. So I think let's not underestimate the amount of peer influence colleagues can have on each other.

Stephanie Koch (31:58):

Absolutely. Have another comment.

Audience Member 2 (32:01):

To piggyback off of the spouse

we want to make sure that the spouse is made aware. I come from a company that is predominantly male, and we all know that males typically don't go to the doctor or pay attention to mail or email. So we reach out to the—

Stephanie Koch (32:15):

I didn't tell her to say that.

Audience Member 2 (32:17):

We do mailers home also in hopes that the spouse will see that. But one thing that I had started last year during their open enrollment, because employees still want to have that face time with you, and with 2,200 employees, you can't go to 250 branches. So I started what's called our Open for Business. It's an Open for Business call where I host them monthly, and I just pick a benefit that is hidden or that employees may not be aware of, and I do them in the evenings. So then if the employee wants to click on the Teams link and join the call, then they can also hear about that benefit as well. So like HSAs, FSAs, all the things.

Stephanie Koch (32:55):

I love that idea. Go ahead.

Matthew Lopez (32:57):

Add one thing about Guerrilla Marketing, using your employees to spread the word for you. We've been able to make really good utilization increases just by linking up together with our ERG groups and having very specific communications just to them or a webinar just for them. So everything that we do casts a wide net, we're talking to all employees, but if you can sometimes shrink that net and just go to particular groups, you can really make some headway in increasing utilization percentages at a time versus relying on hoping everybody gets the message. That's one thing, definitely using employees to be your champions.

Stephanie Koch (33:34):

It's a really good thing. Absolutely. Kind of bright, Heather.

Audience Member 3 (33:41):

Well, good morning. Hi, good morning. Good morning. I was very interested, gentlemen here on my left far end, you talked about a non-traditional workforce that doesn't have a company email, that construction company, and the things they were doing about outreach. I worked for a commercial fishing company, and so most of my employees are on one of six trawler vessels, usually up in the Bering Sea. So not much internet connection there. Me and my benefit manager here, we get one opportunity a year. We have a crew-up meeting before they go out, and we say, "All right here." They know if they have a question, they either come to Kelsey or me, but also our employees do not have, most of them don't have a company-issued email. So we require them to give us a working email address so we can send them things about their 401k and their enrollment and all of that. But beyond that, if you have any other ideas I can reach my employees, or what to do, I mean, we're open to it because when you have what I call a non-traditional workforce, it makes it challenging. Plus, we just had somebody ask a question the other day talking about a—what was it, a 401k administrator that we had like three administrators ago.

(35:08):

And I had somebody the other day, they showed me their medical card for a company we don't even use anymore. But they liked that card because it was nice and solid.

Eric Silverman (35:18):

Of course.

Audience Member 3 (35:20):

So I mean, I just find it just constantly a challenge. So any wisdom is great. If not, empathy is always wonderful too. Thank you.

Eric Silverman (35:28):

I'm sure we all do empathize for sure. Absolutely. I appreciate the question. I'm going to tell you what you already know and what you've already heard me talk about, and I hear more objections on this than ever over the years, but it's increasingly gotten easier. Human resource professionals, executives, C-suite business owners, smaller groups, they'll tell us for years, "Well, you don't know my guys. They're knuckleheads, and they don't this, and they don't that, and they're not the brightest." I hear this stuff all the time, guys. Literally, just being honest. Meanwhile, the average salary at some of these companies—I can't speak for you, of course—but the average salaries employees make really great money. So for you to say "you don't know your guys, your guys are not that," I've heard many times, is not only is it insulting and offensive for you to say that—not you, but whoever's telling me—but you're underestimating your population.

(36:24):

I look at my dad, he's 83 years old, and he uses his iPhone quicker and better than I do. Yes, maybe he's the exception, not the rule, but the reality is we are in a society that appreciates that quick text. So yeah, they might be under sea, or whatever you were saying, but I would double down on text as your communication tool and not email. We've seen non-typical industry engagement skyrocket because that's something that they check when they have the signal, I get it. That's something that they see, and that's how their wife or husband communicates with them as well, or their kids. You have to meet them where they're at. Guys, if you go get your car serviced, the car dealer's going to send you a text with a video. Ever seen that? It's going to say, "Here's a walk-around, Mr. Silverman, of the undercarriage of your car and this and that," whatever. You're going to get a message, "Push C to confirm your dental appointment," and "Push C to confirm." You're going to get a message from DoorDash saying your thing's on the way. Come on. If these things are getting messaged, why aren't we using employee benefits as a more important way to communicate via text message? So if you're doing it, great. If you're not, I would try it. I assure you're going to have incredible results.

Lindsey Garito (37:36):

I'll just add one thing, it's a little counterintuitive to what you're saying, but I think when you have a non-traditional workforce, sometimes you have to do non-traditional methods. Another benefits leader a couple of years ago had mentioned how she had an organization, all men not at their desks, and they decided to put information in the bathroom stalls.

Eric Silverman (37:59):

We've done that.

Lindsey Garito (37:59):

It was so interesting and enlightening, and it doesn't have to be just about a male workforce, but the point was that they wanted—it was about EAPs and mental health benefits—in the bathroom, where no one would see them looking at it. No one would see them taking a picture, scanning the QR code. So if there was any stigma about, "Why is this employee, oh look, John's scanning the EAP, he must have something going on," they had the privacy to see the information. So that's just always stuck with me, and I think it's a good way to think about too, where can we share information that might not be the most traditional or tech-first answer, but it's effective.

Eric Silverman (38:41):

I love that.

(38:42):

You ever been to a bar, and in the bathroom they have the bands coming next week? Come on, guys. I'm not the only one. I've seen in the restroom—I haven't been in a women's restroom—but it's there right on the walls.

Jennifer Campe (38:52):

It's interesting too, though, because the flip side is, I work for an identity protection company. It's 15, and this idea of clicking on a link or scanning a QR code or getting something, getting a sort of a systematic and repetitive push from your employer has to be done with a lot of care. Identity theft is going through the roof. I think last year it was like 12.4 billion in fraud. So I think there is, as we advance with technology, there's really a need to be cautious about this, because these frauds are getting so sophisticated that "click on this link and scan this code" could be fraught with other issues for your employees.

Stephanie Koch (39:33):

Yeah, that's a great point.

Eric Silverman (39:35):

Always send an email to your population first, letting them know you're starting a communication campaign. "This is the number it's coming from, this is what it is." It's always going to have a picture attached with our company logo. It's always going to be signed by us, Human Resources, or Julie Head of HR. When you preface it, and everybody reads email, I get it, or gets email, but that does aid what you said, and that's exactly right. It happens all the time.

Matthew Lopez (39:57):

That's super important. If any of you have seen what those domain names look like at the end of these automatic reply messages, it looks like phishing seven days of the week. You have to be proactive about that and let them know exactly what the email address is coming from and things like that, and you'll see a big difference.

Stephanie Koch (40:14):

Yeah, I agree. All right, we're out of time, so I want to thank everybody for your participation. You guys were awesome. Thank you very much, and hope you all got something out of this wonderful session. And what's next?

Eric Silverman (40:30):

We should ask one of the MCs. All right, give it up for us.