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6 Psychology Principles to Apply To Employee Communications

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Borrowing from psychology is one of our favorite things to do at HelloWallet and something we strongly recommend for benefits teams. Particularly with benefit communications, there are specific tactics from psychology that can be used to drive engagement with your programs and specifically lead to employee action. Below are 6 powerful principles that you should consider using in your upcoming communications:

  1. Peer Comparison:  We often look to our peers for guidance, even with benefit decisions. So, if you let your employees know that many of their colleagues are already using a benefit program, for example, that increases the likelihood that they will as well. This is not about making your employees who haven’t acted feel badly, but instead encouraging them to look into a great benefit that colleagues are already using.
  2. Loss Aversion: People have stronger reactions to losing something they have than gaining the same thing. Therefore, you can try framing your offer in terms of what employees will lose (for example, match dollars) rather than what they may gain. Do be careful with this approach, as it is powerful but risky. Employees can interpret this as negative and off-putting, so take care with how you frame the message.
  3. Incentives: Offer something free to your employees, such as a gift card or free seminar. This tactic works well if you are trying to get employees to take a one-time action, like enrolling in a particular benefit or program. On the other hand, if you are looking for long-term participation, you should be wary of incentives, because they are designed to work best for singular, rather than continued, actions.
  4. Urgency: Employees are busy and human, so give them a reason to act now. Incorporating a deadline or reason to act now rather than later will help them respond in a timely manner
  5. Personalization: As an HR professional, use the unique access you have to employee information to personalize emails based on factors like employee age, enrollment in a particular program, or contribution rate. You have an enormous amount of data at your fingertips that you can use to your advantage.
  6. Timing: Consider sending your employee communications at unconventional times, like over the weekend. Some employee populations actually respond better on Saturdays than Thursdays. But, don’t make assumptions about when your employees like receiving communications. You should always test both day of week and time of day and schedule emails accordingly.

With each communication you send to your employees, be sure to consider what your goal is and what singular action you want to promote. This will help you determine what exactly you want to use from your psychology toolbox.

These principles merely scratch the surface of powerful learnings from psychology that you can use in your benefit communications. There is a host of literature that exists on these topics and there are endless tactics to choose from. Rather than get bogged down in the possibilities, start small. Pick a couple of these that you want to try, test and learn, and go from there!

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The post 6 Psychology Principles to Apply To Employee Communications appeared first on HR Post.


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