Make A Wiki For Your Benefits

A problem is hiding in plain sight at your organization: your employees know far less about their benefits than you think, and this post will help you fix it.

LIMRA, a trade association that studies workplace benefits, found that more than 50% of employees do not know whether their employer offers benefits as basic as a 401(k) or life insurance.

At Pendant, we've tested this question ourselves. In 2023 we asked over 1,300 U.S. educators if their district employers had adequately helped them understand their pensions:

It seems the answer is no.

Employees do actually care about their benefits.

Occasionally HR managers redirect blame on their employees: "They don't care. They never remember anything."

For those of us who have been around financial education for a long time, we know well that the idea that employees care only for salary and health insurance is a whopper of a myth, and is trivially disproven.

LIMRA also asked employees how often they want opportunities to learn more about benefits: more than 75% said they want multiple opportunities, at least, every the year.

It's true some recruits are single-mindedly focused on salary. But when employers neglect accessible, meaningful benefits education—or relegate it to a single onboarding session—they're furthering a culture of salary miopia, and walking away from a straightforward opportunity to deepen loyalty.

Employees have more questions than you know.

Many HR representatives believe their employees are the exceptions to the research: "Our employees know they can come to me with any question they want."

While well-meaning, this attitude severely underestimates how difficult it is for employees to talk about personal finance. In fact, they're afraid to ask questions for lots of reasons:

• Appearing self-centered
• Appearing financially illiterate
• Revealing sensitive or embarrassing health issues

Working in HR, you have a clear mental model of how benefits fit together. You know what HMO stands for and what "formulary" means. The National Financial Capability Study demonstrated, however, that a majority of adults across all age groups fails to understand even basic financial literacy questions:

Not to mention that over half of them are embarrassed to admit it.

A Solution

There's another reason employees don't ask questions: they don't know what they don't know. For years, we have offered a paid phone and line. Years ago when I didn't appreciate the depth of the problem, I offhandedly asked an employee how he liked the plan:

"What phone plan?" he asked.

Doh!

Pendant—an enterprise solution from Banzai—is dedicated to making your custom benefits clear and accessible to your employees, with no effort on your part.

But in this post I'll share a simple solution you can implement yourself, for free. We'll make a wiki for your benefits.

It's not complicated and it doesn't require developers. It's so simple it might seem obvious. But doing it well takes vision and a concerted, consistent effort.

Choosing Your Tool

A wiki is mostly comprised of online pages and links. You can pick any online document system—Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian's Confluence, or Notion, for example—but I recommend something that your employees can access securely and easily.

For demonstration purposes we'll use Google Docs because it's free and widely available. (We'll build it step-by-step, but I've also prepared some templates to get you started faster.)

Step 1: Create Your First Benefit Page

Start in Google Drive. I'll demonstrate with a wiki for a fictitious financial institution named "Hometown Financial."

Create a dedicated folder for the wiki in Google Drive:

Inside that folder, create a new Google Doc:

The first page will be an overview of the Tuition Reimbursement benefit. (I've chosen a non-traditional benefit to emphasize that employees care about all of their benefits—not just their health plan.)

Change the document's name to "Tuition Reimbursement: Overview." Then, at the top of the page, repeat the name of the benefit and its page name. (In this case, I've written "Tuition Reimbursement" as a level 4 heading, and "Overview" as level 2. Consistent styling is an easy way to give your wiki a thoughtful look.)

Now, give your page body copy:

In addition to the body copy, we've found that employees appreciate two or three bullet points that give your readers an "at-a-glance" view of the benefit. Add them above or below the copy.

Finally, add a section for FAQs:

Step 2: Take the Benefit Further

Your wiki needs to strike a balance between giving them meaningful information without bowling them over by a single page.

To expand our benefit, we'll introduce subpages. So create a second document in your wiki's folder:

We'll call it "Tuition Reimbursement: Course Pre-Approval":

For good measure add a second subpage:

Now associate these subpages with their parent. Bring the benefit together by adding the subpages as links to the overview:

Step 3: Create the Home Page

Our last step is to create a home page for your benefits wiki. The home page will act as the jumping-off point to see every benefit.

Create another document, and call it something like "Hometown's Benefits." Dress it up however you like, with your logo and explanatory text.

Then add a link to the tuition reimbursement overview.

Here's how the home page might look when when you get all the benefits up and running:

Conclusion

You did it! With a benefits wiki, you've opened several important opportunities for your employees:

• They can learn about their benefits at their own pace, whever they want, and on neutral ground.
• You've signaled to employees that the company welcomes discussions about benefits, and there's a safe place to find answers to questions of all kinds.
• Don't repeat yourself (DRY). With a single source of truth, you can refer employees to the wiki rather than repeating your answers again and again.

Thanks for reading, I hope this article planted some useful ideas in your mind!

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Consider learning more about Pendant.

Everything we talked about above can be handled by Pendant, with no effort on your part. Really. We even create the content for you.

There are significant drawbacks to making your own wiki from scratch. It's not rocket science, but consider:

A powerful benefits wiki can require hundreds of pages of content. That's a big lift. For Banzai's own wiki, we've also added illustrations to make the content more fun, insurance and policy documentation, and checklists.

Content must stay fresh. A quick way to ruin your employees' confidence is to let the wiki go stale.

Managing links between many pages is... work. Each time you delete, move, or create a document, you will be affecting at least one link, probably more.

Benefits are technical. Consider linking to external resources or defining difficult vocabulary terms inline to help employees understand words like "out-of-pocket maximum".

Showing the right benefits to the right people. Some are full-time, some part-time. To segregate benefits, you'll need separate indexes.

Pendant, meanwhile, does all of this out-of-the-box:

Here's how it works:

1. Super-powered wiki, just for benefits.
2. We handle the setup. You give us the documents you have on hand (PDFs, new hire packet, whatever), and skilled financial education professionals create a wiki from it, presented professionally and attractively.
3. You get to review and request edits until you're happy.
4. Easy employee access. (SSO, magic links, or no accounts at all)
5. You have full control over the software. (You can request further updates from us including changes to health plans, open enrollment, whatever.)
6. The real power kicks in: AI-powered answers to questions, notifications for benefits updates, benefits surveys, workflow management, recruiting sites. I could go on.

If any of this interests you, just click here and we'll show you the system, no pressure.