As employee satisfaction becomes a bigger factor in talent attraction, employers are starting to look for more ways to provide benefits that fit their employees' needs and exceed their expectations.
However, employers tend to under-prepare for open enrollment each year—in fact, 31% of employees would give their employer a “C” or lower when it comes to open enrollment. So, as a broker, it’s important to enter the season with a game plan to help your clients succeed and provide their employees with stellar service and benefits options. Here are four critical tips to prepare yourself and your clients for open enrollment:
Look Back and Plan Ahead
Before planning for the future, take a beat to examine the previous year’s open enrollment. What challenges did you face? What feedback did your clients have? What feedback did their employees have? How can you adjust your systems to meet their growing needs? These are all crucial questions to ask yourself before proceeding with next season’s plans. Ideally, this analysis should happen immediately after enrollment ends, while it’s still fresh in your clients’ minds. However, according to Kirk McConnell, a San Francisco-based product marketing lead at Collective Health, “It's never too late to have a post-mortem of last year's open enrollment.”
Hold strategy meetings with clients to review which processes worked and which did not, then you can lay out the objectives for the upcoming season—including how you intend to measure success. Work with clients to develop specific goals, for example, if you want to steer employees towards high-deductible health plans with health savings accounts, what percentage of employees switching would be considered a success?
This is also a good time to address new ACA regulations and plan for their inevitable impact on the upcoming open enrollment season. However, only 25% of midsized employers are actually completely confident that their organizations understand all of the new ACA regulations. So you have to stay-up-to-date and carve out time for education. Provide clients’ employees with the proper resources and check in periodically with automated emails and text messages to encourage questions and engagement.
Create a Checklist
Create a list and include both quantifiable hard goals—those based on numbers—and soft goals—those based on employees’ feedback. Ask clients’ employees how they felt about their understanding of the company’s benefits, how much effort was required to sign up for the benefits, and how smoothly the process has gone in the past.
Keep the list limited—between one and three hard and soft goals—this will help you focus on only the most important objectives for each client without additional distractions.
Use the Data
Assist clients in collecting data regarding how benefits are being used each year. This information will help you understand which training techniques and educational materials work better than others. Optimizing education helps employees better understand their options and take fuller advantage of underused or under-valued offerings.
Choosing the right benefit-enrollment portal is critical at this point because it can help you track and compare the data in a streamlined way. The meaningful insights on how employees make decisions a portal can provide will indicate where to focus education efforts during upcoming open enrollment meetings.
Effective Communications
When it comes to planning communications, Kirk McConnell says to “think like a marketer.” Proper communication is vital to a successful open enrollment season, so it’s important that your print and online materials grab—and keep—employees’ attention.
Use a tool like Canva to create bold graphics and draw in the reader’s eye. The content itself should be concise, jargon-free, and snappy, with the most important information in a bulleted list. Terms that you are familiar with may confuse your clients and their employees, so provide a glossary if necessary.
Lastly, ensure there is a bold, easy-to-read call-to-action on every material. It will demand attention and push employees to ask questions and engage more thoroughly with the educational materials.
While it’s certainly crucial to a successful open enrollment season, planning ahead can only do so much. Be prepared to answer questions and utilize the proper tools to streamline the process. Clarity Benefit Solutions offers useful resources for brokers to use during open enrollment and beyond.
Sources:
1. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pages/open-enrollment-game-plan.aspx
3. https://library.namely.com/open-enrollment-employee-benefits-survey/
