Even before the pandemic, Valmont, a company that makes infrastructure products–think irrigation equipment, steel utility poles, and windmill support structures–was looking for a better way to communicate benefits to its global workforce of more than 10,000. As health plans and retirement plans changed, Valmont’s employee-benefits team, led by Jennifer Paisley, found employees were getting lost trying to find what they needed.

I spoke with Paisley, Valmont’s VP of total rewards and HR operations, about how her team is using a mobile app in tandem with print mailers and brochures to increase employee awareness and use of benefits. Our one-on-one conversation was part of From Day One’s June virtual conference, “The New Benefits that Employees Need and Want Today.”

Paisley’s team first identified the problem in 2019. “We knew that our employees just couldn't remember, ‘Who’s my medical carrier? Who’s my dental carrier? Oh, you added managing student debt–what was their name again?’ We knew employees were struggling because they can’t navigate, they don’t know where to go, they don’t know who the carrier is, and frankly, all the benefits [they have],” she said.

When employees can’t remember carriers, when they don’t know what’s being offered, they’re not going to take advantage of what’s available. So the HR team started talking to employees to encourage them to use their benefits programs. But what they kept hearing was, “I’m not the decision maker. You’re going to have to talk to my wife” or “That’s my significant other,” Paisley said. (Valmont’s workforce is 83% male.)

That year, the Valmont started working on a way to consolidate benefits into a single source and designing a plan to communicate what’s available. Valmont partnered with Green Circle Life, an HR software-as-a-service platform, to build Valmont on the Go, a web app that consolidates all employee benefits in a single digital location. They rolled it out to their U.S. employees at the end of 2020 and plan to expand it to other countries in late 2021 or early 2022.

Valmont on the Go has two main sections. One is a benefits dashboard, which includes medical and dental plans and eligibility information. The other includes optional tools and programs like disability insurance, tobacco-cessation programs, and access to paystubs. The app is also how employees and their families can access free coaching for stress reduction, nutrition, and other health programs. “We tried to do a one-stop-shop approach,” Paisley said.

The mobile app has been used to initiate communication with employees via text and push notifications, but not everything is digital, Paisley noted. Her team is also using take-home brochures and mailers to reach the decision-makers in the home, and it will likely remain a part of their communications plan. “We’re definitely taking a multi-channel approach. We know that it gets the family members more involved,” she said.

To stretch their communications budget, Paisley’s team worked with Valmont's medical vendor United Healthcare to take advantage of a communication-services credit that’s built into their contract. Likewise, they asked their dental vendor MetLife to send out postcards advertising enrollment periods, which were co-branded with Valmont to remind workers of the connection to their employer.

Valmont on the Go will also help the HR team refine and develop more benefits offerings. Last year, responding to the pandemic, the company rolled out a subsidy for backup child, elder and pet care. Despite promoting the program to employees and offering it for a year, no one used the subsidy, which Paisley attributes to employees relying instead on extended family for those roles. Valmont eventually retired the benefits and reallocated the resources to other programs. The mobile app will make it easier to test new benefits like this and decide whether employees value them–or not.

Paisley sees the long-term potential of the app as an additional communications channel as adoption grows–about 1,000 employees use the app currently–using it to notify employees of plant closures during natural disasters, for example. “I mean, we have scratched the surface.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.