Tip of the Day: Get to your 'fighting weight'

Employers are fighting the downward economy and upward health care costs by changing weight classes, so to speak. Instead of heavyweight, high-cost HMOs and PPOs, companies are slimming down to become middleweights, shifting costs to employees through consumer-driven plans, changing insurance carriers and/or bridging gaps in core offerings with mini-med and voluntary benefits.

Although employers months ago began trimming their bottom lines, making changes to salary, hiring, training and benefits budgets, as open enrollment season fast approaches, benefit managers must educate employees about how those changes will affect their benefits options for next year.

In the opener to EBN's three-part Open Enrollment Boot Camp series, Associate Editor Kathleen Koster gets open enrollment tips from communication experts, who generally recommend revisiting open enrollment offerings and policies six to nine months beforehand to ensure enough time to effectively communicate with employees.

Tip of the Day: With annuities, it's all about how you say it

We've all heard the saying, "It's not what you say, it's how you say it." Benefits communications experts certainly know this to be the case, but it appears that it's also true of consumers and annuities.

New research from TIAA-CREF Institute finds that that "framing" -- using certain methods and media to present annuities to consumers -- can significantly affect consumers' preferences.

Tip of the Day: Texting and Twitter may actually boost productivity

Yessss! Finally, the news I've been waiting for -- thank you, Aon!

New research from the consulting firm reported on BenefitNews.com reveals that despite employers’ belief that Web 2.0 media may detract from productivity, workers — both millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) and non-millennials — are leveraging the technology to perform their jobs.

For example, 65% of non-millennials and 72% of millennials report using their company’s intranet for their job duties, while 25% of non-millennials and 38% of millennials utilize text messaging for work purposes.

In addition, 46% of non-millennials and 48% of millennials used instant messaging as part of their job assignments, while 13% of non-millennials and 20% of millennials belong to job-related social networks. About 8% of non-millennials and 13% of millennials used blogs in a work-related context.

As such, Aon encourages employers to embrace social media for employee communications purposes. Let EBN help; join our Facebook and LinkedIn groups and follow us on Twitter.

Yay or Nay: Is Twitter a valuable, viable benefits communications tool?

It's no secret, the world's gone a-Twitter. Whether being used to communicate with friends, colleagues or like-minded strangers, the social networking site Twitter experienced 1,382% growth between February 2008 and February 2009.

With more than 7 million registered users, no doubt you and/or many of your employees are among the twitterati. As employers continue to struggle to engage employees in benefits communication, it's hard to ignore the potential for reaching that many people at once. Stay tuned for an EBN report on one company's success in communicating via tweet.

So, does your company use Twitter (or a Twitter-esque medium) to communicate with employees? Would you consider doing so? Is Twitter just a fad -- as one of my colleagues called it, "the mortgage-backed securities of communication" -- or is it a valuable, viable communications tool with staying power? Yay or nay?