Annual enrollment is one of your biggest moments of the year and it’s almost always hectic, especially if you’ve made changes to your plan offerings or employee costs.
No one likes an unexpected surprise when it comes to benefits, but a strong communication strategy can help ensure your employees have the right information and resources well ahead of their AE window.
Here are 3 tips to help you make AE as smooth and informative as possible.
If you haven’t done so yet, make sure you review your existing benefits suite to get ahead of any changes or problem spots you had to manage last year.
When polling our current clients, we found that many look at how supplemental and voluntary benefit programs can enhance the value and performance of their current plan. Here’s what we recommend looking at in your benefits program:
Here’s where you can start: Check out our Pinnacle Partners, our highly vetted and trusted industry partners that provide crucial voluntary benefits and programs to support your holistic benefits program.
It’s no secret that employees are confused about their benefits. But as confused as they are, these same employees are hungry to engage with their benefits—they want to enroll in the best-fit plans for them. The barrier, though, often lies in understanding what’s available to them, why it’s relevant, and how they can stack multiple benefits in their favor.
One of the biggest mistakes that HR professionals make during annual enrollment is failing to communicate early enough. Don’t wait until the last minute to start sharing information about the enrollment process and the available benefits. Instead, start communicating early and often about the enrollment period and the benefits that will be available. This will give employees ample time to review their options and ask any questions they may have.
Technology can make this easy! With the right communication tools in place, all you need to do is figure out how often you want to send communications, what you want to inform your employees about, and hit the “automate” easy button to send those communications out.
Here’s where you can start: Make sure you’re honoring employee communication preferences. Leverage a technology that requests their preferred communication methods from day one, to ensure the best possible delivery of those important messages.
Decision support is critical to not only educating your employees but also helping them select the right fit plans. This starts with making sure your benefits technology is set up to deliver your benefits information in a way that is easy to understand.
For example, within our own technology we found startling results:
Our own UX experts have spent a lot of time and research to understand how employees navigate through a website to look for critical benefits information. This means creating a consistent experience throughout your benefits portal, delivering key plan and eligibility information, and including important information like documents required for dependent verification.
Here’s where you can start: If your benefits experience doesn’t have a decision support tool, you can still help your employees make confident benefits decisions by pulling together an FAQ or using a communication strategy to outline in plain language the value and purpose of the benefits being offered.
With thorough preparation and the right tools, annual enrollment doesn’t have to be a headache. By reviewing your current offerings, communicating effectively, utilizing technology, training your team, and soliciting feedback, you can help ensure that your employees have a smooth and successful enrollment experience.
