Work from home: Trust and transparency are critical
At Benefitfocus, our Benefits & Wellness group is working hard to keep our employees engaged and productive while they work from home during this crisis.
It starts with trust
The foundation of our company culture is trust and that has
never been more important than now, when everyone is scared and uncertain about
their work situation.
These are the times when employees are going to remember how we treated them, including how we communicated.
During this crisis, our Benefits & Wellness team members are doing everything we can to maximize transparency.
We are striving to be as upfront as possible with our teams on what we know, what we don’t know and what we can’t talk about.
Four Pillars
On the benefits side, we are working to enhance and expand
the benefits that are of greatest importance to our people right now.
This means we are thinking about all aspects of our
employees’ health: physical, mental and
emotional, financial, and then what we call social and purpose.
Even before this crisis, we sent our remote folks a “benefits fair in a box” package. And that will be our template for sending out care packages to remote workers when it’s again safe to do so.
In the meantime, we are delivering virtual packages using the Calm app and other electronic means.
We’ve also started live and recorded webinars 4 days a week,
touching on the various aspects of the “four pillars” each one about 25 minutes
long.
Emotional and Financial Healthcare
As I mentioned, we are also trying to address emotional and financial health issues our team may be dealing with.
We’ve brought in CariLoop, a solution and support platform
that connects employees to care coaches.
We are covering the cost for that service to help our team
find and navigate caregiver support resources.
Many of our webinars cover financial topics, including what’s happening in the legal arena around tax deadlines and new legislation.
And we’ve partnered with Kashable to provide access to a
short-term loan benefit that can help avoid bad moves like borrowing against a
401(k) to pay for unexpected expenses, especially if a spouse or partner is
laid off.
Regular Cadence
It’s important for us to make sure communications go out with a regular cadence, so everyone knows what we are thinking about and working on.
But we also know everyone is being bombarded with so much
right now that we are careful not to hit them too frequently or with too much
information at once.
Our CEO has made video messages that were sent out to our
associates to communicate everything that is going on and we have hosted follow
team meetings within all the different areas of the organization.
We are also making our execs available for scheduled chat
sessions to keep everyone as involved as possible while we go through this
together.
Finally, returning to trust, we are being very careful to make sure any information we share is accurate. And we are reminding our teams regularly that they need to take breaks from the news tsunami and be very careful about where they get their information to help reduce stress from inaccurate stories and scams.
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