Once a company’s annual benefits enrollment period ends, Benefits and HR professionals (and sometimes their Employee Communication counterparts) often find themselves reviewing and updating their summary plan descriptions – a sometimes unwelcome and tedious task.
For those who need a quick definition: A summary plan description (SPD for short) is like a benefits plan’s user manual — all-too-frequently complete with technical language and legalese. Required by law under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), the SPD is a comprehensive document that lays out the important details about a company’s health insurance, retirement plans, and other benefit programs. It describes who’s eligible, what’s covered, how to file a claim, and what rights employees (and the company) have.
But SPDs don’t have to be impenetrable thickets of jargon. The fact is, a well-written and designed Summary Plan Description (SPD) can be an essential communication tool. Employees may not read their SPDs cover to cover, (or page through every screen online), but they will turn to the SPD for information they need, including benefit details, when they’re facing life events, such as hospitalization or retirement.
An up to date, easy to use SPD not only enhances the employee experience, it reduces calls to your service center, HR, and carriers—saving time and money.
Here are some tips for making your company’s SPDs useful communication resources for your employees.
- Plan ahead. Build SPD updates into your overall communication plan. Depending on the extent of benefit changes, you may not need to update your SPDs each year, but you will need to provide up-to-date SPDs to new employees within 90 days of hiring them. And if there is a major plan change, you must make a new SPD available within 210 days after the plan year in which the change is effective. Be sure to let employees know when and where the most recent SPDs are available.
- Brand your SPDs to complement your broader benefits program so they don’t look and feel like standalone communications. Incorporate branding guidelines for fonts, color palette, and formatting for tables and callouts. Use communication style sheets to ensure consistency in terminology.
- Write and design with employee comprehension in mind. Use proven communication methods like summary charts, callouts, white space, and links to internal and external resources. Avoid jargon and insurance-speak. Keep it clear. Keep it simple.
- Enhance usability through technology. Employees turn to their SPDs for specific information. Help them get there without wading through pages that don’t relate to their needs. Incorporate navigation from the Table of Contents and use page/section references and summary charts to enhance readability—and the overall employee experience. If you have a microsite, consider adding a Resource tab for SPDs and other legally required documents and plan contact information.
SPDs are legally required, but that shouldn’t mean packing them with legalese. The O’Keefe Group can help you plan, draft, design, and produce Summary Plan Descriptions that will make benefit details easy to understand, while keeping your plan compliant. A resource your employees can rely on when they have a need to know.
