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A career HR professional, Kate Sanderson briefly deviated to underwrite health plans at Cigna before committing to professional services firm Aon for the past 13 years. Now, the 42-year-old communicates with 24,500 U.S. employees as the global head of total rewards and HR shared services at Aon. She spoke to Employee Benefit News about how the global company uses its partnership with Aon Hewitt — one of its business segments that focuses on talent, retirement and health— to keep employees engaged and the types of targeting communications she sends out. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Employee Benefit News: You’ve been with Aon for 13 years. Have you seen a change in the way your company interacts with employees?
Sanderson: Oh absolutely. I think the digital world that we’re living in right now has really transformed and dramatically improved the way that we are communicating with our colleagues. I think we’ve been able to make a number of changes where we just made it a lot easier for our colleagues to be educated, to make the right choices for them and for their families. We’ve been able to make things that are complex a lot simpler. Certainly technology has become a big piece of this, but we transformed from being more transaction-focused in the past to really focusing our benefit communication around motivating and educating our colleagues. It’s changed a great deal over the past few years.
EBN: Where have you focused your efforts in benefit communications? What kinds of technology do you use?
Sanderson: We really have a team approach here. It’s our total rewards and benefits team, then we also partner with our HR communications team; we also have a strong partnership with Aon Hewitt and their external client basing practice around employee benefit communications. We are in fact a client of that practice. So those three groups partner very closely together. One of the major trends that we’ve seen or changes that relate...