The Frequency

The payslip is the one document every employee opens, whatever their shift pattern, so that is where the benefits prompt goes. Frontline workers may not reach a portal during work hours, but they look at their pay on the day it lands. A short line on the payslip, or in the message that delivers it, saying what is available and where to ask, reaches people the webinar misses.

The timing follows from that. Benefits communication usually runs on the HR calendar. Deskless workers run on the pay calendar. Moving the prompt to pay day, and repeating it the following pay run, changes who responds, because the question arrives when money is already on their mind.

Two things make it hold. The line names a person who can answer, because someone on site will ask a colleague before they fill in a form, and the detail behind it fits on a phone screen during a break. Running HR and payroll on one platform keeps the link between payslip and benefit record simple to maintain.

Hi, I’m Wojciech, the Managing Director of Bravo Benefits, an employee benefits company. We’ve been building employee benefit programmes for more than 14 years and have worked with thousands of businesses across the UK.

Over the years, we’ve been able to help businesses with this exact problem. Many businesses put a lot of time and money into their benefits, but then find that engagement remains low. The reality is that often the benefits aren’t the problem! The real issue is that employees don’t know what they have, don’t really understand it, or they can’t remember where to go to access it. This is especially true with frontline teams whose work patterns are varied.

What we recommend is having a hub where all benefits can be in one place. That was a part of the thinking behind our Smart Hive platform. Employees have one place where they can see and access their benefits, without having to remember several different websites and logins.

Having said that, I don’t think the answer is just giving people a platform and assuming the job is done. You still have to remind people what’s there to make sure they get the most out of their benefits. For frontline teams especially, that might mean posters with QR codes in staff areas, benefit guides, and reminders at various points in the year. Our built-in marketing suite in Smart Hive means that these reminders are easily communicated, thanks to our ready-made posters and emails.

The key is not to overcomplicate it, but to offer what employees are really after – they want to understand their benefits and know how they can make a real difference to their lives.

I think a lot of benefits communication is still based around a fairly old idea of how people work. You get invited to a 40-minute town hall, or you’re sent to a portal and expected to go and find the information yourself. That doesn’t work particularly well for someone on a shop floor or moving between sites, but to be fair, plenty of people at HQ don’t want to sit through a 40-minute town hall either.

The change I’d make is to stop treating benefits communication as a one-off event. Break it into shorter, useful pieces that people can get to when it suits them, then make the detail easy to find again when it becomes relevant. For frontline teams, that might mean mobile access around a shift. For HQ teams, it might simply mean not having to block out nearly an hour to get the two or three bits of information they actually need.

You can still use live sessions where they add something, particularly for questions or discussion. But they shouldn’t be the only route to understanding what’s available. Giving people shorter, searchable information makes the whole thing more accessible, regardless of whether they work on the frontline or at a desk.

Give them 10 paid benefit minutes as part of their workshift. They can click through from a phone-friendly URL, QR code, etc. What can they do in those 10 minutes? Well, that’s up to us to define before they need to clock back in.

Sure, 10 minutes doesn’t seem like much. But eliminating just one barrier (invisible ones are the worst!) to accessing something can have huge impact. Think about needing to remember webinar links, logging in, signing up… after your eight-hour workday is over! Enrolling in benefits shouldn’t feel like homework.

Scheduling 10 minutes after a natural break also encourages taking action by ensuring when they take that action, they have time to process and complete it. They’re already stopping what they do. You’re paying them to take action NOW. And with one simple link, they’re moved into “take action” mode via their phone. A 30-minute webinar demands attention. Ten “protected” minutes allows people the time to utilize, and that time is critical when you may not have access all day at a desk. Sometimes access is a scheduling issue (which the portal fails to address).

We benefited from changing the format of how we shared benefit information. We held 5-minute huddles at the start of each selected day. We would only discuss 1 pre-approved topic per huddle: e.g., healthcare, PTO, reimbursement policies. The huddles are supported by a 1-pager that employees can reference while on the job. This was so much easier than sending emails—we realized our team really doesn’t have time to read emails. No one had to log in or sign up after work hours either.

We also drove participation by repeating the same topic 3 weeks in a row. We know that sometimes, even if we understand what’s going on in the present (ex. benefits changes), our brains need time to process new information. By asking the team the same question 3 times, we gave them another chance to get on track before enrollments began so they knew exactly what they needed to do. Another perk this method had was that we were able to receive more buy in from team members on how we were benefiting from these perks. In years past, we underused our benefits because people forgot about them or didn’t understand why we needed to know that information. But now that we’ve tried this method, there’s no going back. Our team engagement numbers are through the roof!

Accessibility begins with understanding that your frontline employees will not always be able to stop serving customers or doing operational work just because HR schedules a webinar. If employees are measured on how quickly they respond to customers or how many claims they handle each day in claims and accident-management offices, for example, benefit communications should adapt to shifts and operational needs instead of adding more tasks to already overflowing plates. Include managers in the communication loop by giving them a few bullet points and answers to common questions so that employees can ask questions or bring up concerns during natural dialogue. Not only will this allow managers to tailor their benefits information to each team member, but it also allows benefits to feel more human.

Another way to relay this information in an accessible way is to communicate before or after shifts. Since teams are already grouped together at the beginning and end of their shifts, allowing five minutes to explain one benefit and answer any questions can be more beneficial than sending an elongated benefits package and hoping they’ll read it on their own time. HR will be able to identify trends by documenting repetitive questions, participation and where confusion seems to occur. This will allow HR to adjust and improve where communications may be broken. For teams in operational roles, successful communication ultimately means that employees can explain benefits, know where to find them and use them when the need arises.

One way to help deskless workers better understand how to maximize benefits is to host a paid, 12-minute shift-change presentation covering: the one decision we should make today; the deadline to make that decision; how much it costs per month; and what their next step will be. After the presentation, hand workers a one-page summary, and they can walk away. This helps people get in the right frame of mind before their shift starts. It also makes it much easier if someone from the benefits team spends a few minutes there each day to answer individual questions and clarify concerns that arose in the shift-change presentation. It is also a way to reinforce messages from earlier webinars.

The benefit of hosting this type of event during shift changes is that you aren’t relying on workers sacrificing any personal time, nor trying to reach people after a hard 10+ hours of shift. At the end, you may even find that you’ve been having much more luck when, instead of having workers fill out an online form, you have them write down what the deadline was and the next action they’ll need to take before their shift. It’s also nice when a benefits rep is there to answer questions during the shift change. You don’t always have enough time to answer all the questions, but you can point people toward resources and ask them to follow up with a question during another call. Also, you are more likely to get answers from workers if someone else explained what happened, then it is their turn to say “yes.”

Benefits communication often fails frontline teams because it asks people to enter an unfamiliar system alone. They must make important choices without enough guidance or confidence. This process feels confusing instead of supportive for many employees. People engage more when the experience feels clear, guided, and easy to follow every day.

A better approach is to give trained site leads time for private benefit check-ins during quieter work periods during enrollment week consistently. Questions surface naturally in a comfortable setting without added pressure. Confusion is resolved early and follow-through becomes easier to track. Accessibility improves when support comes from trusted local leaders instead of a distant central team every year.

Access to benefit information is provided after regular working hours or via means that do not require employees to be sitting at their desks. Instead of having an HR presentation via webinar or other portal means, we provide clear and concise written or oral presentations that employees can easily understand while using the phone and other convenient means.

The biggest improvement in communication of benefit information involved scheduling benefit guidance meetings before or after shifts instead of having one HR presentation during working hours. Employees were able to ask all their questions in a familiar environment and were not required to sacrifice their personal time to get all the information about their benefits. The important point was to have the information available to employees at their convenience.