| RESOURCES
Laying out enrollment options: start spreading the word about benefits long before employees start looking at their open enrollment menus
by Linda H. Heuring
In the weeks ahead, open enrollment season will be on your radar. You'll be formulating the messages that you'll send employees about their health and other benefits. By November or so, you'll be deep into the procedures for explaining benefit options to employees and gathering their enrollment decisions. And then except for tracking down a few stragglers, perhaps, and tying up loose ends--it will be over until next year.
Or will it?
Increasingly, benefits experts are saying that the success of the messages you send to employees at open enrollment time depends largely on the groundwork you've laid throughout the year and the effort you've put into preparing those messages. In other words, communicating with employees about next year's benefits choices begins soon after you close the books on this year's open enrollment.
As plans' costs and complexities increase and as employees are steered toward fuller responsibility for their health and retirement plan decisions, HR'S role of communicating about benefits is taking on greater importance.
"Of all the things we do in the benefit world, the one we overlook the most is employee communication," says benefits consultant Gary B. Kushner, SPHR, president and CEO of Kushner & Co. in Portage, Mich. Yet if communication is neglected, he says, even a well-negotiated benefits program will "die on the vine."
HR's first step in shaping its message is to acquire a clear understanding of any changes being made in plans and how such changes will affect employees--the steps you're doubtless taking now as this year's open enrollment season approaches. In fact, knowing and communicating the impact on employees is crucial, says consultant Pare Rollins, a communication practice leader in Southfield, Mich., for Watson Wyatt Worldwide, which has its U.S. headquarters in Washington, D.C. Employees, she says, must trader-stand the rationale for file change and where to get additional facts and answers to their questions.
If such information is made clear to employees, Rollins says, at least they'll understand it "even if they don't like the change."
Next, HR has to make sure the messages to employees are crafted carefully and that the best media for delivering them are selected, in light of the company's culture and employees' needs. If available, internal communications specialists would handle those elements of the program. (See "HR and the Communicators" in the June 2003 issue of HR Magazine.) Otherwise, it would be HR's responsibility to shape and deliver the messages.
Finally, HR should apply its own yardsticks to determine if the communication program succeeded.
To accomplish all of those goals, many HR professionals are concluding, there should be a year-round education program on health care costs and retirement financing. In effect, communicating with employees about their open enrollment options becomes a summary of the trends and developments that have been set before them since the last time they made benefit choices.
"If I'm doing it right," says Kushner, "I'm doing it all year."
Aluminum producer Alcoa Inc. has shifted its focus from a once-a-year benefits discussion to an ongoing look at benefits and health. Donna Bauman, manager of human resource communications at Alcoa's corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh, says the company publishes a newsletter that is part education and part benefits communication.
A recent issue, for example, examined rising health care costs and the new consumerism approach in health care. It also provided an update on flexible spending accounts, an article on a new voice-activated benefit system, a feature story on a drug provider and its web site, and stories on ergonomics and on the steps being taken at one Alcoa facility to reduce the risk of injury during the handling of test samples.
By tying the stories to specific Alcoa business issues, Bauman expects to make an impact on health, satiety and benefits understanding.
IBM Corp. publishes benefits-oriented feature stories on its HR intranet site, says Cathleen Donnelly, senior communications specialist at company headquarters in Armonk, N.Y. Stories in the "Your Health" section cover "current health-related topics such as health care inflation, disease management, health care quality, and prevention and wellness," she says.
At General Electric Co., based in Fairfield, Conn., benefits information is rolled into the communications programs that go on year-round within each business unit, according to Bonnie Lescinsky, communication program manager for GE US Employee Services in Schenectady, N.Y. Through those channels, communication about benefits is supported with articles on the broad range of programs and how benefits interact.
Ongoing employee communication programs such as those at Alcoa, IBM and GE give a company a way to establish a context for the facts and choices that will be presented to employees at open enrollment. For example, "if you know health care costs are going to increase, start weaving in all those messages," says Amy Heiserman, a Denver-based senior communications consultant at Mercer Human Resource Consulting, headquartered in New York.
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Copyright 2003 by Linda H. Heuring and Gale Group. All rights reserved. Linda H. Heuring, a freelance writer in Evans, GA, is a former newspaper reporter and editor and has worked as a corporate communications professional. You can read more of her work at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495. | 
