Janet McNichol, SPHR, CAE, is the Human Resources Director at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. She is passionate about health and wellness and blogs about her experience managing ASHA’s program at Inside Workplace Wellness. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter at @jmcnichol.

Your benefit costs probably represent 30% of your total compensation costs. Are you getting the most from this investment? Do your staff members know what’s available to them and appreciate how valuable it is? Here are four tips to help you get the most out of your investment.

1.    Require everyone to make an active enrollment decision. If you currently use an opt-in approach (you are not enrolled unless you fill out and submit the appropriate forms), consider forcing everyone to make an active decision. In the book Nudge, they state that “One company switched from an opt-in regime to active decisions and found that participation rates increased by about 25 percentage points.” Obviously, you’re not getting the most out of your investment if employees don’t have services when they need them the most.

2.    Make it easy to act. Use tip sheets, check lists, and comparison charts to convey information in an easy to understand format. Use simple enrollment forms that are easy to complete. Carriers will often give you a complex enrollment form that includes benefits you don’t even offer. Push back a little and they’ll tailor a form to meet your needs.

3.    Communicate all year long. Don’t just communicate about benefits during open enrollment. Provide information throughout the year through any and every means available — print, intranet, social media, and most valuably, in-person. Tailor communication to known needs. For example, give new parents a check list of things they need to consider.

4.    Include family members in your communications. Families make up a large portion of your benefit costs and in most families, one spouse takes the lead in managing insurance benefits. If you’re only communicating with your employees, you may not be getting the information to the decision maker in each family. Many organizations make the mistake of putting all their benefits information on their intranet essentially locking it down behind a firewall. Post your benefits information on a site that’s available to all the people in your insured group like Benergy. Use blogs and Facebook to reach people where they are. For example, I recently wrote a blog post about saving money on prescription drugs and then linked to it on our wellness Facebook page and our intranet.

If you don’t have the resources internally to take your benefit communications to the next level, ask your broker for help or take a look at what Benz Communications or Context has to offer. Your staff members are more likely to appreciate the benefits you’re spending so much money on when you do a good job of structuring the decisions they need to make and educating them.

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Janet McNichol, SPHR, CAE, is the Human Resources Director at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. She is passionate about health and wellness and blogs about her experience managing ASHA’s program at Inside Workplace Wellness, where this piece first ran. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter at @jmcnichol.

During our Biggest Loser campaign a year ago, participants recorded their actual weight on our intranet. The system was set up so that no one could see another person’s weight. We could just tell if there were missing entries on a team. I could see all the numbers, but I didn’t know who to associate any particular weight with.

This year we decided to borrow more from the Thintervention model and record changes in weight each week. We also decided it would be fun to visually display each teams’ progress. My colleague, Terry, came up with this fabulous display. Each week, participants weigh in and they record the change in their weight from their starting point (not from the previous week.) If they’ve lost weight, they display it on a green dot, blue is neutral and red shows a gain.

There has been some confusion and debate about recording changes in weight from the starting weight versus the previous week’s weight. I decided to use the starting weight because (1) we had a problem with the scale we used Week 1 and I thought it would throw us off, (2) it seemed more encouraging to look at total weight lost during the program, (3) I can easily tally up the numbers and see which team is in the lead and how much weight participants have lost as a group.

I can still compare the numbers to the previous week to note weekly weight lost and observe changes in the trend. I also know each team’s total starting weight, so we are announcing weekly team winners based on the percentage of weight lost.

Update : Never again will we have people record changes in their weight. It’s caused mass confusion and I have no confidence in the self-reported numbers. It was much easier last year when people recorded their actual weight each week. Live and learn … Lifework Strategies completed the midpoint screenings and I’ll have official numbers from them soon. Stay tuned.

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Deirdre Reid, CAE, is a freelance writer who helps organizations create content and conversation. Connect with her at Reid All About It or @DeirdreReid.

Last week KLM said its frequent flier program will include advance tickets for sub-orbital space flights from Space Experience Curaçao. Flights could begin as early as 2014. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has already begun test flights on its six-passenger space plane. 370 seats, at $200,000 each, have already been reserved.

The Overview Institute must be overjoyed at this news. Their wish is for people to have the same “fundamental perspective-altering experience” that astronauts do when looking back at Earth from space — the Overview Effect.

“…the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, … a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere … national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide us become less important and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this “pale blue dot” becomes both obvious and imperative.”

We can’t even begin to imagine that experience and perspective. However, we can understand why it occurs. Our perspective shifts after spending time in a non-Western country or any culture that’s markedly different from our own. New insights emerge. On a hike along a mountain trail or a stroll at the beach, our mind expands into the space that surrounds us. Ideas flow.

In the office, we’re often too busy to think. Our daily lives don’t encourage deep strategic and creative thinking. How do we make time and space to think and gain new perspective to help us meet the challenges we face? How do we ‘reset’ or reboot our minds so we can create new ways of fulfilling our mission, short of getting on a space plane?

• Retreats: Don’t rely on the same people you always use to facilitate if you want different results. Find the innovators in the profession.
• Idea flow: Get out of the office for small group gatherings in odd places. Create a list of conversation starters. Try a walk or a picnic in nature; an outing to a museum, historical site or zoo; or a train or RV excursion.
• Have each staff person spend a day with a member. Don’t leave out your administrative, accounting, HR and IT staff; they can visit their counterparts.
• Reset days: Take a few days for intentional reflection, learning and reading by all staff. Some offices do this at the end of the year between holidays and build personal planning time into it too. Plan it around your legislative, regulatory and meeting calendars.
• Alert your leadership and set the e-mail, phones and social media to “out of office.” No working and catching up allowed.
• Bring in outsiders for brown bag lectures or Q&A sessions.
• Schedule specific reading and meet as a book club.
• Try some camp activities; make something with your hands.
• Create quiet reading areas.
• Schedule time to share discoveries with each other.

In an attention-deficit, multi-tasking world, sometimes we need to detach and get some distance for a while to gain the perspective necessary to keep moving our organizations forward. A space flight isn’t in anyone’s budget, but you can find creative ways to spark innovative and strategic thinking with your staff.

Related Posts:

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• Be proactively appreciative to prevent resumes from flying
• How to prevent ideas and opportunities from falling through the cracks
• Is Boomer Leadership Failing Millennials?
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This SmartBrief Insights guest post comes from Deirdre Reid, CAE is an association consultant, speaker and trainer focusing on member engagement and social media at Deirdre Reid LLC. Connect with her @DeirdreReid. Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the series at SmartBlog Insights.

Umair Haque, in his Harvard Business Review post, From Social Media to Social Strategy, believes social strategies will change the essence of organizations and social media tools can be a catalyst for that change. He talks about seven social strategies that will be the key to success and help organizations provide meaningful and sustainable value to members, customers and communities. I’ve already examined Character and Control. Today it’s Creativity.

Creativity

Haque says most organizations “defend old (ideas) tooth and nail: a formidable source of antisocial behavior.” There are many reasons for this, some I’ll discuss when I look at Culture as a social strategy. One culprit is group-think and its cousin, the leadership bubble. It’s easier to climb the leadership ladder and be endorsed by those in power when you think like them and view the world through the same spectacles. You’re a safe choice; you won’t threaten their legacy. But what are the chances for new perspectives and ideas in this environment? Is there a way to combat this group-think?

Haque suggests, “The creativity strategy hinges on utilizing social tools to explode how imaginative organizations are.” How? Implementing social media is a learning process for everyone – how to use the tools and, more importantly, how to behave in this new space and adopt new approaches to member relations, member service, marketing, professional development, public relations, political action and more. We have to stretch and move out of our comfort zone as we do new things in new ways – effective exercises for our creative muscles.

As more staff and members become involved in the social media space, they’re exposed to new ideas and perspectives and new sources for professional development – all catalysts for new ways of thinking and creativity. Another side effect of social media is collaboration. Social media can’t operate in a silo. Integrating social media into an association’s operations requires staff to work together across departments. When walls break down, people are often more comfortable in changing together the way they’ve always done things.

Social media platforms are continual online focus groups. If you listen you can learn a lot about your members – their interests, needs and worries. By being receptive and responsive, you give members permission to provide valuable content and ideas that help you steer the association in the best direction.

Social media can also give people their chance to shine. It may be the medium that finally allows some staff and members to contribute in a way that’s more natural to them. It’s a conversational and content-rich space. There’s a greater emphasis on personality and “being real.” Perhaps it can help loosen up some folks who feel left out by the existing culture and protocol. Now instead of bringing only their left brain to work or a meeting, their right brain can come along too. These social sharing types are assets in this new space. Encourage them to collaborate and experiment. Get them in a conference room (or online chat room) with others and let them come up with new ideas and approaches for making your association more meaningful and valuable to your members.

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