The American workforce has
become vastly diverse over the years with individuals from
different ethnic and cultural backgrounds becoming more
prevalent in society. As a result, more employers are
facing a significant challenge of recognizing and
understanding the key differences and value structures of the
various audiences within their own workforce – especially when
it comes to marketing the employer’s benefit plans to those
groups. This is why many businesses have moved toward a
strategy of inclusive benefits to reach employees of varying
ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds.
“Inclusive benefits” is actually a
conceptual term for the extension of corporate
inclusion/diversity programs into employee benefits
offerings. According to a recent report by Hewitt
Associates entitled Multicultural Marketing of Employee
Benefits,
employers with multicultural employee bases can no longer use
the one-size-fits-all approach of simply translating benefit
details into workers’ native tongues. With the inclusive
benefit model, businesses must first realize that their
employees are not just benefit recipients, but benefit
shoppers and consumers making choices to fit the needs of
their families. Then, once the benefit plan is packaged
and marketed as a consumer product, the employer must then
analyze the ethnic makeup of their workforce and formulate a
marketing plan to address the multicultural differences.
This may require taking time to understand a group’s needs in
order to better speak their “cultural” language.
Creating targeted campaigns focused
on cultural and societal values can go a long way toward
educating a multicultural workforce. In regard to health
benefits, some groups may have reasons for not trusting the
care they can receive at various clinics or doctor’s offices,
and others simply may not understand the need to purchase
insurance while they can obtain it for free at an emergency
room, similar to the way they receive in their native
land. In addition, certain demographic groups do not
consider the advantages of preventive care measures, which can
put them at greater risk and make employers vulnerable to
higher-cost interventions (i.e. emergency room usage).
These are some of the issues employers must take into
consideration when marketing their benefits to diverse
groups.
The inclusive benefits approach
also requires that employers consider generational groups,
especially in the way their plans are communicated. Many
of today’s younger population communicate more frequently via
social media and formulate many of their own opinions with the
help of their social networks. Employers must be
prepared to customize their messaging to target different
generations especially as the technological base continues to
grow.
Inclusive benefit plans are
intended to help employers reach out to multicultural employee
groups by understanding the behavioral and cultural
differences and creating targeted strategies to address those
differences. While employers need to be wary of
stereotyping their marketing strategies or the legal
implications of only addressing one particular demographic,
there are ways to address cultural differences even where
values – protecting family members, access to care – are
similar. Of course, it is unreasonable to expect
businesses to address the differences of every possible
demographic, but inclusive benefit approaches can address the
needs of a variety of multicultural groups within the
workforce.
Hill, Chesson &
Woody has already recognized the need to develop inclusive
benefit communications for employers, and in order to continue
offering cutting-edge consulting services for our clients, we
are currently enhancing our communications service platform to
help our clients market inclusive benefit solutions to their
employees. These enhancements will serve as a supplement
to the comprehensive service package we currently offer to our
customers, and we anticipate them to be ready for application
by the end of the third quarter of 2010.
In the meantime, to
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