Think about the hours, effort, and dollars your HR team invests in planning, writing, designing, and publishing a benefits guide annually. The paper alone could be enough to clear a small forest! And yet, how many employees actually read — really read — the benefits guide?
Judging by the questions your team gets bombarded with each open enrollment period, the confusion, and poor choices, probably not many.
If you find it hard to accept that your team’s hard work goes overlooked and underappreciated by so many employees, just look at this data from the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans:
- Nearly half (49%) of employees don’t understand their benefits.
- 80% of employees never open benefits communication.
A significant portion of your company’s employees never even open your benefits guide! Why is that? Don’t they want to make the best benefit choices for their health and wallets?
Of course they do. The problem is that many of your employees may not feel that your benefits guide is particularly helpful in that regard. Some may even feel that your benefits guide creates more confusion and complexity than it resolves.
Why Employees Shun Your Benefits Guide in 2025
The typical employee benefits guide is dense, jargon-heavy, and generally out of step with how modern audiences prefer to consume information and make important decisions.
If your benefits guide is failing to connect with your employees, it may be because:
- Employees are already suffering from information overload. Between sifting through hundreds of emails per day, staying on top of group chats, and working through an endless stream of documents, proposals, and presentations, many employees may simply be at their limit when it comes to written content.
- Benefits guides make assumptions about what employees already know. Believe it or not, 96% of Americans don’t understand basic health insurance terms like copay, deductible, and coinsurance. Without this base of knowledge, a benefits guide can be incomprehensible.
Benefits guides are impersonal. People these days are used to personalized recommendations for everything from restaurants to music to search results. Your employees might be struggling to place the information from your benefits guide in the context of their own lives.
4 Alternatives and Updates for the Traditional Employee Benefits Guide
The standard benefits guide — printed and intimidatingly verbose — just isn’t the right fit for the employees of 2025. It’s time to reimagine the benefits guide to make crucial information accessible and understandable so employees can feel confident about their choices.
Benefits communication should also respect employees’ time. Your employees work hard enough. Choosing benefits should not add to their burdens.
With that in mind, here are some ways to supplement, refresh, or outright replace your company’s benefits guide:
1. Give Your Benefits Guide a Glow-up with Helpful Visuals
can also be a significant aid to understanding. A well-made chart, diagram, or illustration can reduce a difficult concept to its essential elements more clearly than purely written content.
Some engaging graphical design ideas for your benefits guide include:
- Using tables to help employees quickly compare health plans
- Deploying charts to show employees cost savings over time
- Highlighting key passages with callouts
- Bringing benefits decisions into the real world with illustrated personas and scenarios
If your team lacks visual design expertise (or the time to give your benefits guide a makeover), don’t worry. Cost-effective professional help and eye-catching pre-made templates are available.
2. Captivate and Educate with Video Benefits Content
What do the world’s favorite apps and platforms — like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube — have in common? Video. People love video content, and not just for its entertainment value. According to one survey, 83% of people prefer watching video for instructional or informational content over text and audio.
A well-produced video can make learning digestible and fun, which makes video the perfect medium for explaining confusing benefits topics (like how HDHPs work). A splashy launch video can also help generate excitement for a new benefit option, such as an employee wellness program.
Don’t know anything about video production? Don’t worry.
With Flimp, you can access an immense library of pre-produced explainer videos covering everything from key health insurance terms to financial wellness. We also provide custom video production, with a streamlined process that can take your video from script to finished product in as few as three weeks.
3. Centralize Benefits Info with a Microsite or Portal
One reason employees hate researching benefits is that the information is scattered across so many different sources — your benefits guide, vendor sites, informational presentations, a variety of handouts and pamphlets, and the list goes on.
With a benefits microsite or portal, you can consolidate everything employees need to learn about and enroll in their benefits within a single one-stop resource.
Instead of dragging out the benefits guide from the bottom of a desk drawer whenever they have a question about benefits, employees can log into the microsite (from any device, anywhere) and get their answers.
Microsites or portals make benefits information accessible and convenient. Lightweight design, simple navigation, and a singular focus keep employees from feeling overwhelmed.
Microsites are also surprisingly easy to create. Click here for examples and learn how quickly Flimp can set one up for your HR team.
4. Offer Genuine Guidance with a Decision-Support Tool
It’s called a benefits guide, but how much guiding does it actually do? For the most part, employees are left to make their best guesses about how the benefits information presented in the guide applies to their lives. The consequences of their decisions in terms of costs and coverage are up to employees to figure out.
Needless to say, this is not what employees want. Nearly three-quarters of employees wish someone would tell them the best health insurance for their needs.
Unfortunately, your HR team probably doesn’t have the time to sit down with each employee during open enrollment. But with a decision-support tool, you don’t need to.
Decision-support tools are web or mobile apps that act as virtual benefits advisors.
Typically, the tool will ask each employee a few questions about their healthcare usage. Based on the employee’s answers, the tool will project the employee’s costs for the various plans offered — including premiums, deductibles, and copays — and provide a side-by-side comparison.
The best decision-support tools can be completed in a few minutes, leveraging cutting-edge analytical techniques and drawing from hundreds of millions of data points to present accurate estimates and plan recommendations.
Learn more about how decision-support tools work and find out how to choose the right decision-support tool for your organization.
Beyond the Boring Benefits Guide
Whether you decide to stick with your reliable benefits guide or ditch it entirely, we recommend expanding your benefits communication campaign to include other channels, such as the four discussed above. (There are plenty more to explore.) Benefits communication works best as a year-round multichannel campaign designed to cater to different learning styles and content preferences.
Schedule a chat with a Flimp expert to talk about updating your company’s benefits guide and benefits communication strategy for modern audiences.