Is just offering new employee benefits enough to make your employees use it? Will your staff actually take advantage of the benefits, such as financial planning resources, that you provide?
There are steps to take and other factors to consider to ensure your employees get the most out of their benefits. When this happens, everyone is better off — your employees are happier with all that their company offers, and you’ll be happier as an employer by keeping more people around.
Take a look at how to best help your staff take advantage of their benefits, such as financial planning, and get started with IonTuition to roll out incredible employee perks programs at your business.
Getting Employees Invested
Be Conscious of Their Time
Time is one of the biggest reasons why your employees might not initially take advantage of resources you’re offering. Your employees are (hopefully) busy, and not just at work. The idea of taking time to communicate and a new benefit to your workers is a worthy task. It might seem like they’re not interested in tackling some financial planning, but there’s a good chance that they simply don’t feel like they have the time to do so.
How to Fix: As often as possible, work your benefits marketing into internal communications – even if it’s only a single line with a call to action to sign up. Use them in footers on landing pages and even in email signatures. The trick is to present the offering enough times so you’ll have the best opportunity to catch workers at a slow period where they’ll have time to check out their new offering.
Make Benefits Well-Known to New Hires
Many workers don’t understand the full extent of their employee benefits packages. If you’re offering financial planning but your employees don’t know about it, how they can truly take advantage of this resource?
How to Fix: For all incoming employees, designate time and space to explain what benefits are being offered to them, and take the time to truly go through each of them. Chances are, simply providing information will open the door to more involvement and participation.
Show the Merit
It’s true, the very base-level of getting workers invested in their employee benefits is to provide information. But for many people, it goes further than that. If a person knows about a class they can take, they’ll be less inclined to sign up if they don’t know how it will help them.
How to Fix: Not only should you take time to inform employees about the many resources you’re offering, you should also be sure to explain the benefit of, well, these benefits. Consider the two scenarios:
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“There will be a financial planning meeting on Wednesday at 4:30 p.m.” |
“Did you know that one-third of people have nothing saved for retirement? Learn how you can maximize your investments and retirement savings by coming to a free financial planning meeting on Wednesday.” |
We think it’s pretty safe to say which one sounds more appealing. By showing the merit of your resources, you can get more people to buy into what you’re offering.
Provide Incentive
You’ve provided the basic information, you’ve shown your employees why it’s important to get invested in their benefits, but you’re still not getting enough turnout. It’s easy to immediately think people are lazy or not getting involved and motivated about their future. But again, there are so many factors to why people might not be showing up to these meetings — a lot of it boils down to giving people a little motivation.
How to Fix: Providing incentive is a great measure to help build your employees’ motivation and participation in the financial planning services or other benefits you offer. Here are a few ideas on some “extra credit” incentives you can try:
- Provide food: For many employees, they might be inclined to show up or utilize some form of financial planning resource simply because they’re hungry! Everyone loves free food — ordering a few pizzas is a great way to get people interested. Plus, when we’re well-fed, we’re more content, and better able to concentrate!
- Reward for completion: Give out “coupons” to anyone who has completed a class, with the freebie being for anything you can imagine. Try out a “sleep in” coupon where employees can show up an hour late the following day to work — lots of people will likely sign up for such a reward, and the best part is they’ll be learning on top of this reward. Plus, people are taking extra time out of their day to attend this session, so it evens out. For other ideas, work with a local business to get a small coupon or gift card, or provide a relevant gift at the end of all the sessions (if you so choose to spread them out over a course of time).
If you’re not going to be hosting a company-wide financial planning employee benefit session, provide incentive to employees who are working through some of our online resources on their own time. The same concepts can be applied, and you could even make a competition out of which team or which person is completing the most hours, and reward the winner.
IonTuition is here to provide the best toolkits (and guidance) to help your employees are love where they work, and want to continue working with you. Learn more about our IonMatch, IonManage, and IonPay tools, and get started with our team today.