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Why Your Benefits Communications Are Still Too Complicated to Work · Beyond the Paycheck

• Kelsey Willock (00:42) Welcome Brian Sosa, Director of Benefits at Crestline Hotels and Resorts. We're so excited to have you this Monday afternoon. To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your current role, your background, and where you're calling in from today. Brian Sosa (00:56) Thank you, Kelsey. Appreciate being in the podcast. Brian Sosa again, the Director of Benefits here at Crestline Hotels and Resorts. I'm calling in from New York, not New York City. I'm about an hour and a half north of the city. Kelsey Willock (01:11) Well, really excited to learn a lot more about your role and dive into some of your experience, even at the company, beyond the company. But before we get there, let's start a little bit more on you. I'd love for you to share with us your earliest memory of money. Brian Sosa (01:26) That is a funny story. And I was actually thinking about that. Um, I was listening to your podcast and one of the stories that always comes to mind every time that I think about money is I've always been at a car guy ever since I was a kid. I've liked cars and I've always been a saver. So any funds that I would get for my Christmas or my birthday or even lunch money that my parents would give me. at, I would save some of it or probably most of it if I I'd be honest. And then it got to a point where I had what I would think considerable amount of money at the time for a kid, of course. And we were walking around a mall and I see this to what at the time for me was a beautiful Hummer that I wanted so badly. So in all questions, I would just ask my parents, hey, can you buy it for me? an awesome car, would take care of it, I would love it. And they looked at me and said, hey, you have some money, you could buy it. So I inquired about it and I was super hesitant. Then after a long conversation with the salesman and hoping that my parents would be convinced to buy this car for me, they didn't budge. And I ended up looking to buy it. So I was pulling money out of my wallet to this to this day. remember opening my wallet as a kid, I'm pulling bills to pay for this car. And then when I went to pay for it, I wouldn't let go of the bill. the salesman would hold the bill on the other side. And my parents just looked at me and said, hey, it's okay. You can come buy it. You're not spending all your money. You're going to get the car that you wanted. You inquired for so long about. So I finally let it go and to this day, I still have that Hummer on the shelf. Every so often I walk by it I'm like, okay, it was worth it to a degree and definitely a lesson learned that it's okay to spend money. Kelsey Willock (03:34) love that lesson because it's actually really hard lesson to be a saver in the first place. So it sounds like your parents really helped instill the right values to be able to do what's so challenging for so many. But then we forget why do we save? We save for, you know, bringing the things, the life joys, but it can be hard because all that saving takes up so much work. Brian Sosa (03:56) Right, you know, it was even to today. I mean, I sometimes have trouble spending money because like, well, I worked so hard for this money or it took me so long to save it. Am I okay with spending all of this or whatever the situation? It could be something minimal, could be something small or could be something big. But it definitely is a lesson that I would say it's an ever growing lesson over time. Kelsey Willock (04:24) We all have such complex relationships with money, so thank you for sharing that with me. What was your first job and do you remember what you spent your first paycheck on? Brian Sosa (04:35) Yes. And I didn't have a traditional job or a traditional paycheck, if you will. And to give you a little bit of background, both of my parents are accountants and my dad, works for himself. So he is somewhat of a consultant for clients. It's a strategy and accounting consulting process that he does. And I was bored in like a summer break and it was like 10 in the morning and I would hang around with my dad. in his office and at that point, because I was bored, said, hey, how can I help? And he gave me a task which was organizing the task schedules for all his clients. And that was using Excel. He showed me how he wanted it done and I ended up doing it. He reviewed it. And when he was done reviewing it and sent it over to his clients, I said, okay, how much are you going to pay me? And he said, well, how much are you going to charge? So I thought for a second, and I was like, I'm not so sure. It's like, I need you to give me a bill. That's what he said. Give me, give me some sort of bill. So I spent about the next day, the full day designing my own bill, creating a logo and coming up with all this similar language to what his bill would look like. And I charged him a dessert. So I wanted him to take me out for dessert. I don't remember exactly which dessert they got, but. Part of it was, hey, I will go out with my dad and have some yummy food that normally I wouldn't get at home. So that was my first paycheck. But again, it wasn't the normal, you get some money for the services that you provided. Kelsey Willock (06:17) And also taught you a very valuable lesson that making a market is deeply challenging and it takes a lot of work finding the right price. Brian Sosa (06:23) God. You know, it was so interesting to think about, even being that little, was probably like 13. I did it because I was bored, not because I was looking to make any money or anything like that. But it was just that perspective of, much is my time worth? Or my knowledge? That's a very difficult concept to come by. certainly you continue to have conversations, whether it's with colleagues or at the time with my parents to determine what that would look like. Kelsey Willock (06:58) And how do you think your relationship with money, whether it's in your first paycheck or that time that you bought your first Hummer how do you think it's affected how you think about paying benefits on behalf of your employees? Brian Sosa (07:12) I like to think about it from the perspective of one, we get value out of our benefits and out of our pay, right? So while it's difficult to come to a number, there is a number for us in the market. And it's important for us to understand what that is and how do we improve that market value, right? So as you move through your career, you want to improve your market value by gaining skills, right? So that's why Some of us will get degrees. That's what some of us will get certifications and things of that nature. And in terms of what I do in my role is giving or looking to give employees the guidelines and the tools so that they can make informed decisions. So in this spirit of kind of timing out with the Hummer example is, well, it's okay. to inquire about things. It's okay to learn about things and it's okay to be a little uncomfortable as long as we're learning something and that we're trying to move forward, right? So from my position, I look for what tools can we bring to employees? What solutions can we bring to employees? One, to make the research a little easier, to give them quality services altogether. and to give them the better results, whether it's in healthcare or whether that is in the retirement space. Kelsey Willock (08:44) I think this is a really great segue into talking actually a little bit more about what's going on in today's landscape and where we're seeing breakdowns because you're already getting to the point about figuring out the right choices for yourself can be deeply complicated, especially as we're navigating more complex benefits, more complex healthcare systems. I'm already answering the question almost, know, where are you seeing, know, benefits break down most often today? Is it the communications? Is it a combination of that and something else? What are you seeing on your end? Brian Sosa (09:10) You I see a little bit in the communication side, but I think the primary impact that we see in compensation and benefits is the complication and sometimes the lack of transparency on what we see in each industry. So let's think about benefits and health benefits. We have so much language, it's legal language and then special. names for each one of the things. And then when you go to actually go for your to get services, it's not, it's not very simple to navigate. And the harder it gets, the less interested people can be into it. We do this for a living. And sometimes it's challenging to work around with those services, right? And we, we do this every day. Imagine those who are not doing it every day. So we can communicate to exhaustion. We can hope that we can get all this engagement. But if we cannot make it simpler for people to understand it, for people to navigate it, for people to engage with it, then we're kind of trying to swim upstream. Kelsey Willock (10:33) Is there anything you've introduced or tools you've tried, tools you've built in-house that have helped effectively better communicate benefits and simplify? Brian Sosa (10:42) So one of the first things that we introduced was how can we make those communications mostly around the retirement plan relatable. say if we communicate in numbers, instead of giving you a percentage or using words like deferral, which can sound scary or unknown, it's like, hey, if you put X amount of money, as simple as putting X amount of money, this is how much match would you would receive if you make this much money. Simple as that. Or making it relatable to, in today's market, it's like contributing three gallons of gas, right? So, gas is like at $5 right now a gallon. So we can say, okay, that's something relatable. It's like, hey, I can put $15 aside and that could grow drastically, right? Without needing to use this really complex language to kind of bring it down and say, this is simple. And we make it simpler for you by also giving you immediate guidance on how to sign up right away. So a lot of our communications are here is all the information that you need or the baseline information. Plus, if you want to investigate even further, it has more. But we recommend you to take action right now. So if you're this is interesting you at all. Go into the system, start looking into it. And then after that, then you can expand your analogy even more, And involve yourself even more into the benefits world. So that's one of the things that we use. Kelsey Willock (12:21) What I really love about that is I think that so often we try to educate with the language that we're using, such as, you know, get the company match or make sure you're getting, you know, 5 % of your paycheck. into your retirement fund. Not everyone knows how to do that math and some of that conversation can be intimidating. So I love the application of where people are already spending their dollars. It's so easy to contextualize and we often forget like less is more in this world right now. Brian Sosa (12:46) Right? Right. And to your point, another thing that we did to drive engagement and the Crestline where we've managed 120 properties across the nation and they can range from properties with 20 employees to properties with over 100 employees. that the range is big and we're not all doing any like all the time sitting on a computer or anything like that. that communication challenge is big. And one of the things that was successful for us was use a little bit of competition to get each property to say, I want to get my employees involved. That was very, very successful last year. We achieved over 85 % engagement in our open enrollment which was never seen. We would see about 20 % in prior years, maybe 30. That was a lot to say. this Kind of handing that ownership to the leaders of each property and say, push this out, share the information. And then if you hit that 100 % engagement and by 100%, we don't mean that you have to opt in into the benefits. You just have to go into the system, review them, ensure that you are fully aware that you have benefits that you can sign up right now. And that if you choose not to have any, then it's your choice. made your own decision, but at least you know. If you sign, if you logged in and completed your enrollment, that counts. That gave us a huge result and also a lot less concerns from the employee side after open enrollment was complete. It seemed like everyone knew. I can tell you when I was projecting the potential winners was expecting like five tops 10 properties to achieve a hundred percent. I truly was thinking five because it's a hard thing to do. You're asking people to go into a system on their own time and complete their enrollment. We had 21. That is a massive endeavor. And then the ones that were behind them, it wasn't by much. They were all in the 80, 85 % plus that they would receive it. So huge, huge results by just making everyone accountable for the results that we're getting. Kelsey Willock (15:19) I'm super curious, was there a financial implication to that? Say, you know, the top branches that completed, did they have some type of financial reward or was it pure competition that motivated everyone? Brian Sosa (15:32) It had some reward, but it wasn't financial. It was something for the team. So we gave him a wellness, one of our wellness options, which is having somebody go into the property and give something nice or do something nice for the employees of the property. But that also, the way that we thought about it is that gives the team a little bit of a jump into, hey, we did it. We all came together and We did whatever we needed to do so that we can all be engaged. Therefore, we're getting this additional result, this additional, I'm to call it reward. That doesn't impact just a few people, but that could impact anyone on the property or a good number of people. Kelsey Willock (16:17) that I imagine it also kind of allows you to run a program like that at a pretty low cost, that it doesn't become this kind of massive burden on the company to, know, incentives can get really expensive really quickly. And kind of the group can be actually more powerful than, know, hey, you get $100 if you show up for this thing. It's, know, hey, we get $100 for this thing. We love camaraderie. It's yin and So it's a really brilliant strategy. Brian Sosa (16:29) Right. Right. Kelsey Willock (16:45) What's benefit that you've worked on or introduced in the past or either at your current company that you've seen go from really attracting talent to transforming the lives of your employees? Brian Sosa (16:57) You know, I would hope that we're helping people's lives on a day to day basis. and hopefully turn those lives on a day to day basis. I couldn't tell you specifically one solution that does it because they're all tailoring different points of life, different conditions. So one of the changes that we made internally was changing our benefits admins platform. And. The result of that is easier communication with our employees about benefits, which leads to higher engagement. And then beyond that, it's being able to, in the future, integrate our benefits so that our employees can go in and think about us as a one-stop shop. Hey, you go into this platform, and then I can do anything related to benefits and compensation and perks, whatever you want to call it. I can do it all in this one place. In addition to that, the type of data that we get. So a lot of the times we think about, what solutions do I have to implement? But we kind of forget that it's cyclical and it changes over time. Right? So maybe today one solution was helpful, but then five years from now, the need for that might've changed because of the changes that we had as a company and population. So Being able to have the data that would support whatever decisions we're looking to do, what we're doing to drive the strategy for the company. That's one of the things that I think would long-term make a huge difference is having the right partners and the right data tools to be able to make make a change and then make a difference on people consistently. Kelsey Willock (18:45) One of the themes that's coming up for me, Brian, is you're a highly analytical person. So it makes a lot of sense to me that, you know, we see a lot of value in things like running employee surveys. However, they don't always capture what are the things people actually do. And so I imagine having a BenAdmin system that really helps you dissect that, know, where are people leaning in, where are their gaps might even be more effective. In essence, it's almost like a predictive insights tool of where the organization is headed and where folks really need support. Brian Sosa (19:19) And like you said, I'm a big fan of data, but I'm also not afraid of diving in sometimes and kind of doing a little bit of risk. An example that I can tell you is last year in terms of communications, sometimes it's hard to survey people and you would just hear a few really loud things, but you won't hear what the actual need is. And it's also a little bit of that survey fatigue that starts going on. You start surveying them for different departments or things like that. So we just launched the communication based on what we thought it was going to be needed by our population. And it certainly wasn't what people needed or wanted. But then you hear it. All of a sudden you hear, hey, we didn't want that. We wanted this instead. Can you do that? Absolutely. We can. We can make that happen. And a few months later we arranged so there would be the webinars and the presentations that were necessary or multiple languages for that to take place, which is specifically what people were asking. And we got the feedback from several sources. They were saying, Hey, we would have wished if this was this other way. Great. We can make the mistake and then we can get the data a little bit quicker and without needing that. that survey out and hoping that people would answer. So that was another of the interesting takes that we had in the past couple of years. Kelsey Willock (20:54) I mean, it brings up a really good concept that don't be afraid to try things because even if they fail, you can learn a whole lot of incredibly valuable information from why maybe they fail. It wasn't meeting this exact pain point, but it allowed us to learn from people what they actually wanted. it's a good reminder. Don't be afraid to take that leap of faith and take risk. Not everything has to exactly be in that domain. Brian Sosa (21:05) Bye. Exactly. you Kelsey Willock (21:20) What compensation and benefits trends do you think are going to shape the employee experience most over the next year? Brian Sosa (21:26) From an employee experience, think care navigation tools, that the stronger they get, the stronger the data analytics get behind the scenes. And the more encouragement that health plans are going to have to drive people into those tools to maybe, let's say, reduce their co-pays or reduce their deductibles if they engage in those tools that focus on giving you high quality doctors. And better results from a long-term perspective, those I think could be a really big game changer. Not only from the perspective of the cost of the plan, the cost of the employee, and the ultimate results that the employee would get from a health perspective. How often do we really know that the doctor that you're choosing is the best doctor that you have around you, or that it's that doctor that would have the best outcome? A lot of the times we just choose whoever is first on the line or whoever we've always been going to or whoever we were directed to go. Okay, I'm referring you to this other doctor. Let me check him out. That could really make a difference. So those, think, would be one of the solutions that could make a big difference. And the other one is, of course, AI. Today, AI is a name of part of the name of the game, but I don't think it's going to make a big difference on the employee experience upfront. It's what's sitting behind the scenes. So we're already seeing that doctors offices are charging a lot of the times and they're using AI to map all the codes. And sometimes you go to the doctor now and they have the note taker that's an AI that converts everything into codes and then plans have the fighting back AI too. to kind of commingle all the information. Which what I think it could turn into is, whether it's going to help us decrease spend and get better results from terms of analytics, or we're gonna quickly see a hike in spend because of the number of codes that we're gonna see is gonna multiply. So it could go either way, but it definitely is going to make an Kelsey Willock (23:43) It's very challenging to ask this question and not hear AI and or healthcare. So you hit the nail on the head. I the next year is going. Um, but my hope is that, you know, even some of these AI tools can help really figure out how to tie everything together because we've got a lot of disjointed systems going on right now. So you have a lot of hope and then hopefully it also helps wrangle some of the, you know, Brian Sosa (23:48) Hahaha Kelsey Willock (24:10) astronomical costs that we're seeing going on in healthcare right now. Brian Sosa (24:13) Right, my hope is right there with yours, I bet. The better experience that we can get employees, one of the things that we want to drive is how can we make things easier to navigate, easier to do from the employee side, and of course, less expensive. But the expense portion, I think, is the harder battle than getting the better experience. Kelsey Willock (24:35) So last question for you, it has everything actually to do with expenses. How important is financial well-being to you and your organization? Brian Sosa (24:42) It's very important right now that the biggest portion of it is focusing on education, right? Like I mentioned at the very beginning, I like to think about what our team does is providing the tool set and the opportunities for people to take advantage of those tools of that education. And then we might give some incentives or things like that for people to get. their feet wet in those situations. But beyond that, we can't do too, too much. So we have tools out there and we try to promote them as much as we can. Of course, tools beyond just the 401k plan, but that aid and support employees within the plan and outside of the plan to get better results. But again, going back to it's a primary need. but it needs to be a decision of the employee to move forward with it. Kelsey Willock (25:40) Absolutely, at end of the day, can give everyone access and you can give them education on how to access, but there has to be some type of internal motivation to get them to actually do the thing. Brian Sosa (25:50) So, you know, it's that portion is tough because you're dealing with an ever growing cost of living. So how can you manage that and be relatable? Right. How can we make it relatable every day as we see costs for everything go up? Kelsey Willock (26:09) Right, inflation, you even mentioned the cost of gas, everyone's certainly feeling it. So how do we help address it in a time where that stress is going up is acutely important. Well, thank you so much, Brian, for this conversation. It's been phenomenal speaking with you. Really appreciate it. Brian Sosa (26:21) That's right. Kelsey Willock (26:27) Everything that you had mentioned, but also everything tangible that you had shared that listeners can take away and do something immediately with. I always find that so valuable when it happens organically in these conversations. So really appreciate it. Where can our listeners connect with you beyond this conversation? Brian Sosa (26:42) LinkedIn definitely is one of those places. And yeah, just send me a note or connect directly with me on LinkedIn and I'll be happy to connect, to have a quick chat or go back and check the message. Kelsey Willock (26:55) Awesome. Well, thank you again, Brian. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and thanks again for joining us. Brian Sosa (27:01) Likewise, thank you Kelsey.