The benefits are
fabulous, the carriers are helpful, and you’ve prepared catchy brochures to
entice people into your benefits fair. You’ve arranged for representatives to
be stationed at a table, ready to help employees make their choices. Everything
is in place. In fact, you’ve even had the enrollment materials translated into
Spanish to make things easier for a growing segment of your employee
population. So why didn’t your Spanish-speaking employees come?
Nelson L. Griswold III
of Cornerstone Enrollment Services has an answer. The problem is not at the enrollment
table, where you may have materials available in Spanish and even
Spanish-speaking enrollers. The problem is in the days leading up to the
enrollment.
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“If you have
Spanish-speaking employees with little or no English,” Griswold says, “they
tend to stay away from the enrollment. You can tell people you have Hispanic
enrollers, and it’s a bit like telling them that you’ve got somebody handing
things out without telling them what the things are. If they don’t know what an
enrollment is, and the value it would have to them, they won’t show up. No one
wants to go up to the table and appear ignorant about what’s being offered.”
The lesson came home
when Cornerstone worked with an electrical contracting company on an enrollment,
says Griswold. “Some of the employees knew zero English, but the company felt
they didn’t need any Spanish language materials because they had bilingual supervisors.
But try to get an electrician who happens to be bilingual to explain employee
benefits. He might be able to read something, but then again, his English may
not be sufficient to explain and understand benefits. We ended up doing
conference calls back to our offices, and our native Spanish-speaking employees,
to explain what was being offered. As soon as they understood the nature of the
benefits, they got in line—they wanted them. But they would have passed by the
entire enrollment.”
“We have a rough idea of
how many Hispanic employees there are in the
don’t know how many don’t speak English. Hispanics are the largest minority in
the
and they are playing an increasingly large role in our economy. If
Spanish-speaking employees with little or no English are to be included in an
enrollment, they need to be provided with information about the offerings in Spanish.
And it doesn’t work to have a couple of bilingual employees who will hopefully
pass the information on to their co-workers. So in fairness to the employees,
who are clearly valued employees because they continue to be employed, they
need to be provided with all of the information HR considers worthy of communicating
in the first place, in Spanish.”