How are employees compensated for the hard work they put in? Many just consider a standard hourly rate or salary. But, employers also offer health, dental and other insurance plans along with paid leaves and wellness programs. These are just a small part of a whole compensation package, so how can you inform your staff of everything that's out there?
Communicating with your staff about the offerings you provide is an important aspect of an employer employee relationship. This certainly does not mean that you’re making them count all the small things. In fact, this is to create a healthy understanding and work ethic amongst the workers.
Oftentimes, human resources and internal communication fall under different departments. Yet, this is one area that combines the human capital element of HR with the communication aspect of IC. Here are a few reasons you should consider total rewards communication as a key integration in your HR strategy.
Add Value to the Way Employees Feel
When projected positively, total rewards communication can help employees feel valued as hardworking assets of the company. When they believe that the salaries are the only type of compensation, they might feel underpaid and undervalued. They are unaware of the hidden expenses that you cover for them. This can lead to lower engagement and higher turnover.
When you communicate total rewards, it helps employees understand the various aspects and the compensations offered. Letting them know the worth of all those expenses lets them assess their value and see that they are fairly compensated.
Boost Retention
Insufficient pay may be amongst the leading causes why people leave their jobs. However, most of these cases are when employees aren’t actually underpaid. Instead, they merely believe they are. Total reward statements help eliminate this misunderstanding and retain your employees before they start looking elsewhere.
Another reason to use total rewards communication is to help employees evaluate the market themselves. Adopt transparency in their compensation. It helps them compare what they are getting with others. It can also attract referral talent, when your existing workers positively compare their workspace with others’. Communicating total rewards can have many positive effects beyond just the surface value.
Attracting Good Hires
A good team and loyal employees are very important to any company competing in the market. Such workers can really add value to the quality of service you provide. Moreover, those with higher performance create an environment that pushes others to excel as well. When people who work for you are sincere in their jobs, you should reciprocate that sincerity.
One of the greatest benefits of good employee engagement is an improvement of the employer brand. Your company’s reputation as a place to work will increase. In fact, your own staff can become mini recruiters, emphasizing all the different ways you treat your workers. This can attract other top performers too.
Creating Total Rewards
A proper total reward strategy must inform everyone of their pay transparency. With improved HR technology, businesses can easily break down the offerings to distribute a personalized statement.
When developing your communication, make sure to first build some context. Convey a strong, well phrased message to motivate everyone and set a clear aim for the company. It can be a statement that defines your company’s motives. Or, utilize multimedia, like a video message from the CEO.
With a variety of employees and job roles, there are a lot of things to manage. This means you have to cater to a large audience and be personal and approachable. Since your offerings are so varied, make sure each person only receives what is relevant to them.
Crafting the Right Message
Design helps navigate and simplify the procedure, making it manageable for you and comprehensive for the employees. Organizing the statements using user friendly and simple designs while balancing functional and aesthetic aspects is the key. After all, charts showing PTO granted should be different from a graph with health care contributions.
Other than a comprehensive design, there should be brief messages about every element of the benefit to educate employees about the strategy and motivate them to take the right actions. Are they maximizing their offerings? Since benefits come from the human resource department’s budget, you want to get the most value of investment.
Add External Resources
HR often has difficulties getting the workers to use other resources. Fortunately, a tool as engaging as total reward communications can be a great gateway to nudge employees to other resources. This includes linking to healthcare websites, social security documents, FMLA forms, and other items.
Feedback is Still a Must
As with all forms of internal communication, you must collect feedback. First, view passive engagement metrics. Which parts of your compensation package are highly viewed? Are they more receptive to certain media formats? Have people elected to contribute more after being shown more information? This data can be shared with HR to further refine your benefits offering for the next open enrollment.
Next, collect more active feedback. Embed polls and forms in each section. If you’d like, use a limited test before a full organization rollout, and run a focus group with those early users. There are a lot of options to hear exactly what your employees want to say. A great benefit of a total rewards communication plan is the creative collaboration between HR and IC.
Include IT
One other department that will likely be involved is IT. You will likely need to import from your HRIS. Personalizing the total compensation documents requires data like timecards, contributions, and accrued hours. Incorporating data from other sites and vendors requires a separate interface and system to improve compatibility like plan sponsors, award managers and health and welfare plan administrators.
There’s also security concerns. Handling personal data is a risky and responsibility demanding procedure. The most important thing is that the website should be secure for employees to access personal details. Consult with your IT department over your security practices.
Collaboration is Important
A large organization will have many different moving parts, so tight collaboration is very important. When communicating total rewards, this becomes an opportunity for human resources and internal communication to work closely together. A comprehensive total reward solution can help them put together a winning total compensation strategy.
