(Published December 1, 2008)
I overheard one of my co-workers on the phone with an employee, and it occurred to me that there are often things that we as HR professionals take for granted, which are not as obvious to those who do not work in the HR and Benefits areas. The topic in question had to do with the vision plan and whether or not the employee could get both a pair of glasses and a pair of contact lenses in the same year. While a vision plan certainly could be written in such a way that you could get both, I've never managed a plan that allowed for that, and I'm betting that not many of you have, either. But for someone who doesn't work in the field, it is a perfectly reasonable question.
In the same way, it doesn't surprise me that our dental plan has a $1,500 annual limit. I've seen limits as low as $1,200 and as high as $2,500, but I've never seen a dental plan that didn't have an annual limit of some sort. It surprises the employees, though. One of them pointed out to me that by the time he's paid his deductible and his premium, he'll have paid out slightly less than 50% of his yearly limit. It didn't make sense to him. Put that way, I could see his point, but I'm so used to an annual limit that it had never struck me that way before.
Sometimes it's semantics that causes the problem. We, as HR professionals, understand that there is a difference between being disabled for Americans with Disabilities Act purposes and being disabled for purposes of the short-term disability policy. But to your average employee, disabled is disabled. You have to admit, it's kind of a subtle distinction.
There's often similar confusion about what is considered work-related when it comes to Workers' Compensation. We know that the injury or illness has to be in some way caused by their employment for Workers' Comp to kick in, but to an employee who doesn't work with it every day, it's hard to explain why the heart attack they had on the job or the food poisoning that hit them in the middle of the afternoon does not necessarily fall under Workers' Comp.
Looking over this article, I see that my examples have all been benefits related, but it's not limited to benefits. In the area of compensation, for example, it might seem perfectly obvious to an employee that if they would prefer extra time off instead of overtime pay, it would be logical to allow them to take it instead of paying them time and a half. We, however, understand that the Fair Labor Standards Act prohibits comp time in lieu of overtime for private employers, but it's hard to explain that to the employee who values his or her family time more than their overtime.
So how do we manage this? There really isn't an easy way. What's common knowledge (or even common sense) to us isn't going to be to our employees, since they don't work with these issues the way we do. But I think it's worth remembering that when we start getting frustrated at answering the same questions, which seem so obvious to us, over and over again, that this is our line of work, not that of our employees, and we would likely be just as clueless if we suddenly were dropped into the middle of what they do every day.
Every profession has their own language and their own general knowledge base. We would be serving our employees well if we were to remember that and try, difficult as it sometimes is, to maintain our patience when they ask questions that, to us, seem obvious.
Catherine Bannon is an HR consultant in Marshfield, MA (catherine.bannon@gmail.com). Bannon worked for 10 years in HR management before starting her consulting practice.
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