Open Enrollment: Avoiding Another Missed Opportunity

Four steps to improving your company’s open enrolment

Highlights:

• Adopt a strategic approach to open enrollment to boost efficiency and elevate the quality of information, resulting in a more seamless experience and optimized benefits.
• Clearly define your benefit objectives, aligning them with organizational goals. This clarity empowers leadership to make well-informed decisions that resonate with both employees and the company's mission.
• Turn open enrollment into an engaging internal campaign by utilizing a variety of communication channels. 
• Transitioning to electronic data collection for open enrollment lightens administrative burdens and empowers employees. 

Let’s face it. For most organizations, open enrollment is a daunting project. And the effort quickly becomes consumed with a plethora of time-constrained administrative activities. Proactively approaching open enrollment from a strategic perspective, however, can improve your experience by:
 

• Increasing efficiencies and quality of information;
• Creating an agreed-upon framework upon which leadership can make informed benefit plan decisions;
• Providing employees with the tools to make informed benefit plan choices; and
• Expanding your workforce’s understanding of the value of the benefits your company is providing.

Four Steps to Improving Your Company’s Open Enrollment

1. Define Your Objectives

Before making choices for the coming plan year and communicating those choices to your workforce, take time to define the objectives of the benefits you offer and the open enrollment process. Leadership should consider questions such as: Why do we offer benefits? Is our current benefit offering accomplishing what we want? How well does our benefits offering align with our current employee population? What could we do to increase employee utilization and the perceived value of our benefits offering? The answers to these questions will provide a framework for making effective benefit plan choices and defining how employee benefits will be managed.

 

2. Establish a Timeline

Open enrollment season can easily sneak up on us. Ideally, planning should begin three to four months before open enrollment. More time may be needed for companies that are making significant changes to their benefits offering or creating new processes and tools to improve the open enrollment experience. When creating your timeline, consider activities that may need to occur before making plan choices, such as defining your objectives, conducting a benefits survey with employees, and researching new benefit options.

3. Create a Communication Plan

Today, open enrollment communications must be much more than requiring your employees to attend the obligatory open enrollment meeting. Open enrollment essentially should be an internal marketing campaign, which requires defining and using a consistent message, determining the communication channels (e.g., email, internet, texting, print materials, one-on-one/group meetings, video, and social media) that will be used to reach your target audience, determining key content components that will be communicated, and defining the timing, method, and content for each communication.

4. Streamline Data Collection

Fortunately, many options are now available that enable employee benefits data to be captured and submitted electronically. Although this process may not eliminate the need to remind employees and validate information, it can transition accountability to the employee and ease the administrative burden. If you are not already leveraging technology in your open enrollment process, check with your payroll/HRIS (human resources information system) provider or benefits providers about electronic systems you can leverage.

Recommended Resources

• Employer open enrollment checklist
• Five tips for efficient employee communication during open enrollment
• Five ways to highlight the value of employee benefits year-round
• How can your business improve benefits administration?
• Maximize your benefits investment with effective employee support during open enrollment

Jean Roque is the Founder & President of Trüpp HR, Inc., which provides comprehensive HR services, including HR consulting services, HR outsourcing, recruiting, compensation, HR audits, employee handbooks, benefits administration, payroll administration, supervisor training, and leadership development for organizations.