The Frequency

Stop assuming the information will find people through email and a desk. For teams working shifts, the honest test is whether someone can get an answer during the hours they are on site, without a laptop, and without waiting for the people team to be available.

What has helped most is carrying the same information in more than one place and in more than one format. Something mobile that can be reached on a phone, something printed where the shift takes place, and a slot in a handover or team brief so it is covered in paid time rather than in someone’s own evening.

The other change is naming a human. A generic inbox is a barrier for people who are not confident writing about money or health, so a named contact, with the hours they can be reached, tends to improve uptake more than better-written materials do.

Detailed questions about entitlement belong with the provider or the scheme rather than with us.

Our crews are hourly W-2 employees who spend the whole day in vehicles and inside client homes. They never sit at a desk. That single fact breaks almost every standard benefits communication plan, because those plans assume an email inbox and a portal login.

What we do instead is treat benefits like a shift briefing, not a document. We cover one benefit at a time, in person, at the start of a shift while people are already together, and we hand out something on paper they can take home and show a spouse. Anything that requires an employee to remember a password later is effectively not offered.

The specific change that made the biggest difference was not a new benefit at all—it was making an existing one unconditional and predictable. We keep a standing payroll advance process. If someone has a cash emergency mid-cycle, they ask, they get it, and it comes back out of future pay on a written schedule. It is a real line in our books, not a favor from the owner. Before we formalized it, people either did not ask at all or asked apologetically. Once it had a name and a rule, usage went up and the awkwardness went away.

That is the pattern I would generalize for anyone managing frontline teams. Variable schedules do not make benefits communication hard because of timing. They make it hard because there is no shared moment in the week. You have to manufacture the moment, repeat it more often than feels necessary, put the rule on paper, and strip out every step that depends on the employee doing homework at home after a nine-hour day.

My cleaning teams never sit at a desk. Between properties, they look at their phone. That is where benefits information has to live. Variable schedules mean enrollment windows land on a random Tuesday for one person and a Saturday for another. A single company-wide email misses half the crew every time it goes out. The change that worked was moving benefits reminders onto text with a direct enroll link. It goes out midafternoon, while crews are actually between properties. A 9 a.m. email blast lands while half the crew is already on a job and sits unread until night. I also stopped relying on attachments for anything that matters. A two-line text explaining what a benefit covers gets read on the drive to the next job. A PDF sits in an inbox until open enrollment closes. The setup I keep running into is workers who wanted a benefit and never got the notice in time. Once the message rides the same channel as their job assignments, people open it walking to the car.

Running a print shop since 1950 means we’ve had every type of employee schedule imaginable — press operators on early shifts, copy center staff with rotating hours, delivery drivers rarely at a desk. Benefits access has been something we’ve had to be intentional about.

The biggest shift for us was treating benefits enrollment like a print project — design matters. We literally printed our own benefits summaries, tailored to our team, and put physical copies in employees’ hands during shift starts rather than directing people to a portal they’d never open.

Being a Certified B Corporation means we’re accountable for how we treat our people, not just what we produce. That accountability pushed us to ask: does every single person on our team — regardless of when they clock in — actually understand what they’re entitled to? When the answer was “probably not,” we fixed the delivery method, not the benefit itself.

The honest truth is variable-schedule employees don’t miss benefits information because they’re disengaged — they miss it because the timing assumes a 9-to-5 reality that doesn’t exist for them. Meet people in their actual environment, on their actual schedule, with something tangible they can reference later.

For those who are working on an hourly basis or have fluctuating work schedules, information regarding benefits is given to them asynchronously so that their ability to access the benefits does not depend on whether they are online at work or attending HR sessions. This is done by giving them brief details about the benefits, along with the eligibility criteria and digital resource centers that employees can use on any device, alongside the required assistance from their managers.

One major change that had a huge impact was removing long documents regarding the benefits and introducing short guides to give clear eligibility criteria for the benefits being offered. In addition to this, examples were also included to help employees understand the benefits practically.