Ongoing Conversations
An employee benefits website should not stop with benefits. It should be a resource for all topics of your company communications. It should become a resource center. A resource center can teach and communicate company culture during onboarding, train for an employee’s success track, prepare for open enrollment, teach next steps for life changing events, encourage employees to try new food with Wellness Challenges, provide access to retirement summaries, and more. This center or hub of communications presents the employee a larger picture of what your company has to offer them.
Access
Your expanded employee benefits website should be accessible. Hosting communications on your intranet, with a password that changes every three months is not accessible. Employees will find that frustrating, and will develop the habit of calling HR when they have questions rather than searching for an answer. Also, many times the employee is not the benefits decision maker. A locked-down intranet can further alienate a family unit from making the best benefits decisions for themselves, and ultimately the company. The employee benefits website should be externally hosted, with a URL that is easy for employees to remember.
Bring Your Employee Benefits Website to Life
Make your website the hub of your year-round communication strategy, and reference it in all your print materials, e-mail campaigns, social media posts, and other communications as the destination for more in-depth information. Information on your site needs to be updated often, with new features and refreshed images. Update the banners. Change up graphic icons. Include a social media news feed. These techniques and more will give employees a reason to keep coming back to your employee benefits website.
