DON’T
F O R GET...
ENROLL
TODAY!
6 TIPS
for Communicating
Benefits to Millennials
How to Reach The New
Workforce Majority
an eBook from
HSA/FSA
DEADLINE
6for TIPS
Communicating
Benefits to Millennials
How to Reach the New
Workforce Majority
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
Introduction
1
Tip #1 | Go big on digital
2
Tip #2 | Personalize and humanize your communications
4
Tip #3 | Share FAQs and a glossary
6
Tip #4 | Be brief and entertaining
7
Tip #5 | Be strategic about visual content
9
Tip #6 | Don’t be afraid to talk savings
11
Conclusion
13
About ALEX
14
www.meetalex.com
1
Introduction
Hi, reader!
In this eBook, you’ll find six suggestions to help you reach the
Millennials at your company better than ever.
Why focus on messaging to your 18-34-year-olds in particular?
Well, believe it or not, those workers that older employees still
might think of as “the new kids in town” are now the workforce
majority. So if you’re not evolving your benefits messages to keep
up with the times, you might not be getting the most bang for your
SUPER H E L P FUL TI P S
buck.
Anyhoo. We sincerely hope the tips here give you some food for
thought. If you’d like more helpful content like this served up to
your inbox every month, please sign up for our newsletter here.
Enjoy!
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
www.meetalex.com
2
TIP #1
Go big on digital.
As you probably know already,
Millennials are uniquely web-savvy
humans. They came of age in the era
of Facebook, and the youngest of them
have never known a world without the
Internet. So it follows that if you make
more resources available—and more
tasks doable—online, you boost your
chances of getting younger workers to
perk up and take action. Specifically,
here are some steps to consider:
3
TIP #1
Go big on digital | CONTINUED
Migrate your enrollment process online if you
haven’t already
Consider phasing out most—if not all—
informational print materials
According to the 2015 Aflac Workforces Report, 62% of
employees say they enrolled in their benefits online—up from only
45% in 2013. If your company is one of the thousands that hasn’t
taken this process online yet, seriously consider making the leap
this year.
Instead of mailing a benefits handbook and a bunch of forms to
your lovely workforce, why not just email them the PDFs (and
make the forms signable with digital signatures)? Not only will you
save some trees, your employees will always be able to search
for that information in their inbox archives.
Promote and archive relevant stuff on your
company intranet
(Note that we’re not advising you phase out non-digital stuff like
posters, standees, table tents, and reminder postcards sent to the
home. Hard-copy promotional stuff still deserves a place in your
get-the-word-out rotation.)
To prevent confusion about where to find what, make as much
of your benefits info available in one place on your company’s
intranet. Bonus tip: provide a link to that database every time you
send any email so folks never have to search for it.
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
www.meetalex.com
4
TIP #2
Personalize and
humanize your
communications.
Millennials enjoy online consumer
experiences that acknowledge them
as individuals. (Thanks, internet
cookies!) So as you create benefits
communications, look for ways to
personalize and humanize content
whenever possible.
YO,
!
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8/13
5
TIP #2
Personalize and humanize your communications | CONTINUED
Address your audience directly with the word “you”
“You” truly is a powerful word. When we read it or hear it, we perk
up and think “Hey, they’re talking to me!” And we’re more likely to
keep paying attention.
So instead of talking about your employees in the third person—
as if they were some faceless group “out there”— address them
directly, keeping in mind that your message is being read one
person at a time.
In selected communications, use a person’s first
name (if possible)
Does your team use postcards or brochures to remind people to,
say, enroll in their benefits, or review their 401(k)? Ask your vendor
if they can use a mail merge function to include the first name of
your employees, nice and big, as a salutation. (As in: Hi, Charlie!)
That first name, plus your company logo, prominently placed, will
help ensure that your message gets read.
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
Ask employees to provide testimonials about your
benefits programs
Nothing will convince wary employees to take a new benefits
offering seriously more than hearing (and seeing) some of their
peers vouch for it. So consider reaching out to the employees
who take advantage of the tools you’d like more engagement
with. Ask if they might answer a few questions on camera or
simply lend their name to a quote about what they love about
program X, Y, or Z. If you make a video, send a link to it in an
email and have it live permanently on your intranet.
Consider technologies that create a one-on-one,
interactive feeling
Especially if you work for a company with thousands of
employees, there’s no way you could provide one-on-one advice
if everyone asked for it. So seek out interactive benefits tools that
can help provide that one-on-one feeling.
www.meetalex.com
6
TIP #3
Share FAQs
and glossaries.
Your Gen Xers and Baby Boomers
have been through a ton of open
enrollments, and most are acquainted
with the ins and outs of their 401(k)s.
However, many of your Millennial
employees, especially recent college
graduates who might have been on
their parents’ plan until they were 26,
might feel more lost than you know.
So why not do your greener employees a solid and link them to a
glossary of health care terms (this one is pretty good), and provide
answers to supposedly “dumb” questions? (Check out five things
that tend to trip up first-time benefits enrollees here.)
For bonus points, make the answers to those questions as lively
and conversational as possible. For an example of some helpful,
conversational FAQs, check out pages 13-15 in our Ultimate Open
Enrollment Communication Playbook.)
7
TIP #4
Be brief and
entertaining.
According to a joint 2014 study by
Yahoo, Tumblr, Razorfish and Digitas,
Millennials favor brands that showcase
that brand’s “personality”; favor content
with an emotional payout; and are most
likely to be receptive to social media
content that is brief and entertaining.
What does this have to do with you? Well, silly as it may seem,
your HR department is a brand, trying to get the attention of your
audience (cough: employees), too. So if you want your younger
workers to not tune you out, you should make an effort to be as
engaging (read: unboring) as possible.
8
TIP #4
Be brief and entertaining | CONTINUED
Add a dose of humor or personality
Avoid jargon like the plague
We’re not talking wacky or groan-worthy Dad-jokes. Just try to
bring a touch of your personality into the materials you share.
For example: Add a light moment in the introduction paragraph,
as you tee up the meat-and-potatoes info you want to get
across. Incorporate a fun, surprising image into your get-theword-out posters and postcards. Keep an eye out for business
communications YOU find engaging, but not inappropriate, and
follow their lead.
Need to explain something sort of complicated about your
company’s benefits in an email? Don’t just recycle the language
your insurance company uses. Do your very best to translate
any and all legalese or jargon into language you’d use when
explaining something to a friend. (Read Beating Benefits
Bewilderment to learn more.)
(To learn how to add personality to your communcations without
crossing a line, check out our eBook 5 Tips for Using Humor in
Benefits Communication.)
Not great: “Beyond the basic benefit, both individual and spouse
buy-up options are available.”
Way better: “The company is going to buy some life insurance for
you. If you want, you can buy extra for you and your partner.”
Consider asking the creatives at your company to weigh in—or hire a freelancer
Engaging communication just not your bag? Wish you could just have someone else do it? Consider asking the content producers at your
company to do a quick review and/or hiring a freelance writer and designer to give your most important communications maximum clarity
and punch.
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
www.meetalex.com
9
TIP #5
Be strategic about
visual content.
Millennials are visual learners who love
themselves some Instagram, Snapchat
and YouTube; they’re also used to
reading content on white space and
image-heavy webpages. So as you
create communications big and small,
make a point to think in terms of visuals
as much as you think about text.
Don’t settle for bad stock art
It’s worth your while to take an extra five minutes to choose an
image for your posters that goes beyond typical yawn-worthy
stock art photos. You know, the ones of laughing businesspeople.
Or focused businesspeople staring at a computer. Or clip art of a
heartbeat monitor. Instead, choose something amusing, surprising,
and memorable.
10
TIP #5
Be strategic about visual content | CONTINUED
Lay out content so it’s easily scannable
Consider making occasional video content
Avoid big, long paragraphs. When you’re dealing with longer-form
content, include headlines that provide a quick capsule of the
content of each section. When you’re dealing with shorter liststyle content, consider using bulletpoints.
If you want to show employees how to do some tricky online
benefits task, consider the power of making a short, engaging
how-to video. If you’re considering the latter, below are two
software options you might consider downloading for free to help
you record audio and video of your screen in a snap.
(Want more specific advice on this stuff? We make it fun AND
brainy with our ongoing vlog series, The Communications
Breakdown. Check it out!)
Add the occasional GIF to lighter benefits emails
and PowerPoints
We don’t know about your office, but here at Jellyvision (which
is thick with Millennials, by the way), we love adding GIFs to our
emails, Slack messages, and intra-office PowerPoint presentations
as a way of making straightforward and dry information feel more
fun. (A good place to find GIFs is giphy.com)
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
(A caveat: Don’t lay out very important nuts and bolts information
in a video; your employees will want to simply skim a document
and find it, not scroll through a video to find the right spot.)
For PCs and Macs: Jing
To learn how to use Jing in 7 minutes, watch this tutorial.
For Macs only: QuickTime (which should already be installed on
your Mac) and Soundflower. To learn how to sync these up, watch
this brief tutorial.
Lastly, just for fun, here’s a tutorial video on how to draw a 3-D
Loch Ness Monster.
www.meetalex.com
11
TIP #6
Don’t be afraid to
talk savings.
Millennials as a generation are both
saddled with a ton of long-term debt
and doing a pretty good job of saving
money for the future.
What does this mean for you?
)
401(k
12
TIP #6
Don’t be afraid to talk savings | CONTINUED
If you’re trying to motivate your employees to make benefits decisions (or just use certain benefits resources
you offer) that might save them money, don’t be embarrassed to talk about those potential savings loudly and
often. Millennials care about the bottom line as much as anybody.
Formula for an Effective
Money-based Call-to-Action:
STEP 1
STEP 2
Get the premium
cost for your most
expensive plan.
Subtract the premium
cost for your least
expensive plan.
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
STEP 3
Use the difference in a snappy message like this:
Want to know how you can save as much
as [difference amount here] per month
in insurance premiums this year?
Use [helpful resource here]!
www.meetalex.com
13
Conclusion
Employees born between 1982 and 1998 are the
new majority workforce demographic—and if you
want to really engage them, it’s worth adding to your
bag of tricks.
Some changes (like adding online technologies) will
require spending a little money—no getting around
that. But even if you don’t have room in the budget
for that this year, simply adjusting the style of your
existing communications (being more conversational,
using GIFs and videos, talking about money without
hesitation) is a big step in the right direction.
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
www.meetalex.com
14
About ALEX
ALEX — the best SaaS benefits communication
platform in the universe — saves HR leaders time
and money by guiding employees through difficult
health insurance, retirement savings, and wellness
decisions. Hundreds of companies, including 71
of the Fortune 500® and more than a quarter
of Barron’s list of the “World’s Most Respected
Companies based in the US,” trust ALEX to transform
confusing jargon, legalese, and gobbledygook into
useful information and helpful advice for more than
5 million grateful end-user employees. To learn more
about ALEX, please visit meetalex.com.
© 2016 Jellyvision Lab, Inc. | All Rights Reserved.
www.meetalex.com