If you’re in HR, you know it’s a very service oriented practice. Employees are HR’s internal customers and one of the biggest customer needs we fulfill are employee benefits. Covering the overall “Employee Offering Package” (Compensation, Benefits and Perks) is a key part of the HR gig.
However, they are the toughest subjects to cover during onboarding or even Open Enrollment: both of which are live meetings specifically designed to review the offering packages and address how to best take advantage of them.
These meetings convey statistics, facts and figures, as well as the intricacies of benefits offerings and packages that are applicable for a given employee. While all of these subjects are important to cover we often find that only about 25% of the information is retained. When you’re overviewing benefits during new hire onboarding, retention dips even lower—to 10%. Most times we’re alerted to this while still talking to a room full of increasingly tired faces.
To be fair, these subjects are dry and littered with jargon that most employees are unfamiliar with.You can try and spice up your delivery to avoid slumping postures and heavy eyes, but all the audience really wants is the gist: a general overview of most important items and dates and ability to follow up with questions when it's time to sign up. So, give that to them.
The template here is generated using Beautiful.ai. While the benefits listed there are not exhaustive, they cover a wide array of offerings. These slides are stunning in their simplicity and visuals, which help engage an audience and avoid bombarding them with large blocks of text mixed with bullet points that are often just as lengthy. They are also incredibly easy to author or edit, so get the template and get a head start on your open enrollment presentation prep.
Offerings Overview
Start from a bird’s eye view. Do you feel like listing the names of all the benefits and perks offered in your introductory slide? Resist that urge. Categorize your offerings, then group those categories into fewer categories. You now have your second slide: “Traditional vs Additional”. Doing this helps your audience create the mental compartments and prepares to fill them with relevant information about each category. A concise agenda slide is an excellent choice for this. Link each item to its corresponding slide for easy navigation.
Health Benefits
Health Benefits are what your audience is here for. They want to know what they are and how much they have to pay for them. Here is a good opportunity to use a creatively designed data comparison slide to show coverage. Then use a carousel slide to go into traditional health benefits including medical, dental, and vision. These are the core offerings and most (if not all) employers provide some sort of premium coverage.
As mentioned, this slide is meant to outline the “what,” and, most importantly, “how much.” This doesn’t mean that you have to list plan prices, especially if your company covers premiums. Instead, use this opportunity to set the stage for brief details to follow by listing the offerings, naming the providers, highlighting their best qualities, and stating your company’s premium coverage.
The carousel slide gives you plenty of space to dive just a little bit deeper into each option without crowding your slide and overwhelming your new employee. Feel free to describe what coverage options are available from each provider, eligibility qualifiers, and point your audience to where and when they might be able to enroll. This information is crucial and—if you do omit it in your presentation—most employees in your audience are likely to reach out separately at different times. Covering this information now may need a little more text than a bullet point would (or should) allow, which makes the “carousel” slide the perfect choice to help section off four distinct sets of information snippets.
Base +
This is where you cross over into dollars paid on top of base salary. Companies who have the most competitive compensation programs boast medium to high compensation ranges, as well as equity options, incentive and bonus programs and generous retirement options. Similar to slide 3, this carousel slide will list what is offered and sets the stage for more details later on.
Now that you’ve covered what is offered, you can anticipate what questions your audience may have and much like in image from “Base +” above, answer them preemptively. Naturally, when you list incentive percentages and 401K contributions, your audience will want to know when and how to take advantage of these. With 401K and incentives being two completely different offerings, it's good to split these two into two slides and talk about their criteria separately.
The Icing on the Cake
Things like personal development plans, flexible work arrangements, new tech, and office perks are all optional offerings that no employer has to have. So, if your company offers it, you should definitely flaunt it. These are all considered to be additional investments in your workforce and most companies balance these with slightly lower compensation ranges. This is a pretty straight forward, bottom line sensitive strategy to cater to the employees seeking a work/life balance.
Culture and Team
Positive and constantly reinforced culture is a difficult thing to achieve. Once you do, it becomes a very tangible part of your offering package. Don’t believe us? Pick a few companies on Glassdoor and scroll through some reviews. “The good, the bad, and the ugly” all have to do with offerings, especially cultural ones. The saying: “People don’t leave jobs, they leave people”—while cliche—is undeniably true. To be more specific, they leave environments, and cultures created by a group of people. The opposite is also true.
In this case, and in most cases, a picture is worth a thousand words. Rather than just writing a bullet point list of cultural and team benefits, show them! Include pictures from team events, outings, and activities. You can also use various filters for these photos, including colorful ones specific to your official company colors.
Leaving an Open Door
A call to action is great. However, there's not much your employees will need to do right away (with the exception of Open Enrollment meetings where you want to reiterate some deadlines). If you haven’t been living/working under a rock, chances are your HR Information System (HRIS) will take care of providing your employees with reminders to enroll as well heaps of documents with varying levels of detail on benefit options. What you want to do is leave them with an option and direction on where to go should they have questions about anything covered or any additional material they’ll receive.
Each company has a unique offerings package. That said, we believe this template will get you started on clearly presenting your benefits offerings and engaging your audience until the very last slide.
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