Getting benefits messaging to connect with your employees

Benefits make up a major part of any employee’s compensation package. Communicators need to know how to break down the complexities within a company’s benefits offerings in a way that’s easy to understand.

At Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference, Jennifer Taffaro, director of benefits at Ochsner Health System, told the audience that her team reassessed its benefits communication approach by examining how employees perceived the information cascade coming their way.

“We wanted to stop just pushing information out and really start thinking through the audience and how they were going to perceive the information,” Taffaro said. “Were they going to understand it? That one-size-fits-all approach didn’t work for us. Our benefits are extremely complex, so we had to start thinking about the audience experience first.”

Taffaro added that her team did a full overhaul of the language in benefits communications at Ochsner Health System to make them more accessible.

“We got rid of a lot of the HR jargon to make it really easy to understand,” she said. “We try to keep everything somewhere around a middle-school understandability level. We stopped writing for ourselves and started writing for the people actually using the benefits.”