How HR can personalize and better communicate benefits

What makes uncertain times even more uncertain? A changing benefits landscape.

Roughly 100 benefits and HR pros gathered at a From Day One conference in Chicago on June 3 to tackle pressing issues in the benefits space—like rising healthcare costs, AI, and employee well-being—and how to address them.

The consensus? Personalized and better communicated benefits, a group of total rewards leaders said during one panel.

“We cannot just offer the same benefits to everybody, because they have different needs, different stressors,” Rahul Rajvanshi, a director of benefits and total rewards at Montefiore Health Systems, said.

What can personalization look like? How employees engage with benefits should be similar to their experience on platforms like Netflix or Amazon, Rajvanshi said. “If everybody had the same screen with the login, I’m pretty sure none of us would be engaged,” he said. “If we can do this for entertainment, shouldn’t we do this for benefits?”

Benefits pros can start the personalization process by looking at utilization rates by employee demographic, Rajvanshi said. When going through this process, he said he noticed that some of his company’s employees delayed doctor’s appointments during the summer because they didn’t have childcare. In response, he got to work on a childcare benefit.

It’s also important to understand that employees approach benefits differently based on their cultures, communities, and families, Rebecca Liebman, co-founder and CEO of financial well-being platform LearnLux said.

“There’s things that feel safe and relevant to you, and there’s things that don’t,” she said. “A lot of benefits, a lot of finance, was made for one type of person, and you even think about two employees who might have identical salaries and identical amounts of debt, but their financial plan might be completely opposite.”

Communication is key. The success of any benefit is dependent on how it’s communicated, some of the panelists said. And a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, Lara Johnson, senior director of employee growth and well-being at cybersecurity software company Netskope, said.

“One-size-fits-all doesn’t work when you’re talking about a young engineer, a new dad, a senior executive,” she said. She recommended meeting employees where they are by using different communication channels, sharing that she sends Slack messages to reach employees who don’t engage with email.

Benefits pros should also communicate about offerings throughout the year and not just during open enrollment, Joseph Park, benefits director at healthcare provider network The Aspen Group, said.

“I’ve been at jobs where we spent all this time and energy in October ramping up for open enrollment, and this burst of communication, and then it kind of stopped,” he said. “So I think it’s about building a communication pipeline that’s going to be sustainable throughout the year.”

Consistent communication can help keep employees engaged and knowledgeable about their benefits, he added.

“There is no alternate to effective communication,” Rajvanshi said. “As total rewards leaders in this room, we may define the best of the benefits for our employees, but if we don’t communicate it well, they’re not going anywhere.”