About a year ago, Edan Barshan took a critical look at the way he was distributing employee benefit information to customers and realized he could learn a thing or two from an unlikely source: cats. "People are watching cats flushing toilets," the president and CEO of Universal Benefit Plans says, referring to the ubiquitous videos on the Internet. "Why not watch your benefits?"

It wasn't too long ago that Barshan was handing employees direct documentation from the IRS. "That's what I used to do, but I've learned from my mistakes because people were not understanding it," says the Boston broker. "I found myself doing multiple meetings to the same company on the same topic ... they weren't getting it."

In response to this realization, Universal Benefit Plans launched "The HR in a Box." Through thehrinabox.com, customers are directed to their own unique Web site where employees view custom "Video Benefit Reviews" produced by Universal Benefit Plans. "That's really working wonderfully for us. It is exciting because it changes the way we've been doing things," says Barshan. "Change is good because it gives us new energy and a new method of teaching."

The concept of enhanced learning through audio and visual cues is a familiar one to Barshan. A native of Istanbul, Turkey, he learned English after coming to the U.S. more than 25 years ago by listening to television and audio tapes. "In order to really increase the level of understanding you have to appeal to more senses than just one. That's what I saw as different, and I have embraced technology to increase the level of understanding," he says. "Being an immigrant has helped me to come up with this new business model to communicate benefits. I can really honestly say that because I remember watching Johnny Carson late at night and listening to English audio tapes."

Of course, much more than the host of "The Tonight Show" has changed since Barshan founded Universal Benefit Plans in 1995. "The audience has changed," he says. "In the '80s and '90s when things were simple you simply gave them the information and everybody got it. However, things are a lot more difficult and complicated now."

Five-dollar copays and cheap prescriptions have given way to consumer-driven plans with multiple payment sources and varying deductibles. One focus of the Video Benefit Reviews is flexible spending accounts, which stand to save employees a great deal of money but are often misunderstood. "We're teaching them the ABCs of flexible spending accounts in a four-to-five-minute video format so people can actually watch how they work versus read how they work," says Barshan. "Because in this day and age nobody actually reads anything cover to cover."

Barshan recently met with a 300-employee prospect that doesn't offer employees an FSA because they are perceived to be "cumbersome, confusing and hard to understand." At the same time, the prospect expressed an immediate need for improved benefits communication: "I wish my employees understood their plans because they keep coming back to me for the same questions over and over," they told Barshan.

Barshan recalls taking the benefits communication papers home when he was an employee, but never actually reading them because he knew he could rely on his HR department to answer any questions. That's not the case any more. "They are tired of answering questions," he says. "They want to say, 'Your mother doesn't work here.' We take it for granted and we treat HR like your mother at home, spoon-feeding the benefits. Now we're doing the spoon feeding in bites that they can digest."

The traditional benefits communication model of loading employees down with information at open enrollment just doesn't work anymore, says Barshan: "You know that they're not going to retain more than 20-30% of what's been said, especially if there are new things that you're trying to introduce for them to embrace."

Barshan sees the Video Benefit Reviews as the answer to the problem. "My goal is to change the way the benefits are communicated in the workplace," he says. "The videos have been wonderful."

Universal Benefit Plans has hired an in-house video production team to produce short videos on a client's range of policies. Mimicking cable news' format, the videos initially provide a 30-60 second vignette on how the policies work. More in-depth product tutorials last from three to four minutes. The videos summarize what employees need to know about any given policy and answer all the basic questions: What is the policy? How does it help me? When does it start? Why do I have to buy it?

One Universal Benefit Plans client, the 2,300 postal employees of Boston, has a government-provided FSA option, and each employee was given a 56-page document on how FSAs work in order to decide if they would like to participate. "Fifty-six pages, can you imagine?," says Barshan. Instead, Universal Benefit Plans has turned that 56-page document into a seven-minute video, as well as a shorter three-to-four-minute version of how flexible spending accounts work that was e-mailed to all employees prior to open enrollment.

To be effective, the education needs to start at least three or four months ahead of time. "We don't expect them to embrace everything right at the open enrollment meeting, so we send them this information way before and then entertain the questions at a later time. What this has done is increase participation ... that means people are saving money on their expenses. This has been taken phenomenally well by our clients."

It's a cultural change that saves the employer's HR staff from having to explain the same benefits repeatedly. "When employees line up at their door they can just tell them to go to thehrinabox.com and view their information where we have uploaded all of the documents on every single policy," says Barshan. "Now HR is free to do HR work, not the benefit-related work that takes a lot more of their time. We've duplicated ourselves and duplicated the HR person there."

Administering The HR in a Box is not without its costs to Universal Benefit Plans, but the added expense and extra effort are well worth it, says Barshan. To produce the videos, the firm had to hire people to script them, air them and appear in them. Including purchasing the equipment, Barshan has easily invested more than $100,000 in the project.

"The cost has increased on our part, but when you get more clients the cost is minimized," he says.

There's also the time commitment. "It certainly is time consuming," Barshan adds. "We have to customize because your policy is different than the company next door. It is really hands on. It can't be a canned video because every company has different benefits."

Before launching The HR in a Box, there was no Web site team at Universal Benefit Solutions. Now, two or three people work exclusively on producing and uploading the videos. Despite the added workload, the initiative has helped Barshan's firm bring in more clients: "This has been a wonderful way for us to get new clients. For our existing clients, it has increased participation and it has saved our employers time and money."

Universal Benefit Plans' evolution didn't start with the videos. The company has been transforming ever since Massachusetts' health care reforms went into effect in July 2007. "The duties of HR have increased because now they have to learn new things about the law, so our duties have also increased," says Barshan. "Our commissions have also been cut, but you can't complain. What am I going to do? Am I going to quit being a broker? No. I'm going to embrace it because we see so many businesses not know or struggle with the information. So we saw this as an opportunity to educate employers on the law."

Barshan has also partnered with local law firms to conduct Web seminars on regulatory changes and compliance issues in an effort to keep up with changes. "We've had to switch over to the advisory role by default," he says. "My business model is still based 100% on commissions, so I'm not charging any company on the advisory, we're just embracing that role so that they understand what the laws and compliance issues are."

Barshan isn't complaining, though. Thanks in part to the proactive Web seminars and Video Benefit Reviews, business increased by approximately 20% in 2009. "You've got to give to get," he explains. "We give the advice, and then we get the business."