¡Feliz año nuevo! and welcome to “Light Bulb Moments”!  This is a new weekly feature that will be appearing in BenefitsPRO to provide easy, user-friendly tips for benefits and financial professionals, as well as employers who work with Spanish speakers.  As we all know, communicating issues like benefits in English is not easy — quite the contrary!  But most of us assume that making that information available to employees who speak Spanish is a pretty straightforward process.  What do we do?  We translate! If our message is in written form, we put our document into Spanish.  If we are conducting a meeting in person, we get someone with a decent knowledge of both languages (we hope) to repeat in Spanish what we are saying in English. Done!  Check that box!  Mission accomplished, right?

Well, not necessarily.  Whenever we educate employees around these issues, we are looking for certain results.  They will choose to participate in the benefits or retirement plans we are offering.  They will use those plans appropriately and advantageously.  They will appreciate the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into assembling and rolling out those plans. These Light Bulb Moments will help you achieve the results you are looking for.  Translation is extremely important (future Light Bulb Moments will address this), but translation alone will not achieve the results you are looking for.