When the Walgreen Co. announced plans in September to move its health benefits programs into a private insurance exchange, current and former employees were not notified of the impending change until after it was disclosed to the public.

“We did get some noise about that,” said Tom Sondergeld, senior director of health care and wellness benefits at the Deerfield, Ill.-based drugstore chain, the nation's largest.

However, Mr. Sondergeld said, the ill-timed initial notification to employees thus far appears to be the company's lone misstep in executing a targeted internal communications strategy. In reality, it had been in development months before the launch of its “Live Well Benefits Store,” the proprietary exchange it built using Aon Hewitt's Corporate Health Exchange platform.

“We started talking with senior management back in May of 2013, and I think because everyone really took the time to learn what this change would mean, everyone knew the language of health care exchanges and had a chance to fully vet the program,” Mr. Sondergeld said. “I think that really helped when it came to all of the different avenues of communication we had to navigate during the rollout.”

Given the layers of complexity involved in moving the company's 174,000 benefits-eligible employees and retirees from a self-insured defined-benefit health care program to a fully insured, exchange-based defined contribution structure, Mr. Sondergeld said a critical element of the company's implementation of the exchange was the extent to which its communications were tailored according to management levels and job setting.

“We focused on three different groups: senior management, mid-level management and team members, and we had specific communication materials designed for each one of those groups,” Mr. Sondergeld said. “Where we had larger populations, we had a much more HR-focused communication endeavor designed to educate the HR field representatives on how to communicate the changes at our distribution centers and corporate campuses.

“When you think about our bandwidth, we have 8,600 stores with about 35 team members in each store; that's a tough reach,” he said. “We feel like that structure and having such strong understanding of the transition at the senior level really helped push that information down to the team members.”