Why do employees make the “wrong” decisions during open enrollment? Why do they consistently say they’re dissatisfied with their benefits, yet rarely try to understand all their options? Why does it seem like so much of your open enrollment messaging—from emails to benefits guides to HR presentations—is being ignored?
Why aren’t employees giving open enrollment the time and attention you know it deserves?
Year after year, for decades, HR teams have been asking these same questions. And, for most of that time, the only answer was, “Who knows? People are weird.”
It’s true, people are weird.
But the last several years of scientific and technological advancement have brought us much closer to understanding why people make decisions and how they learn—and it’s not always what you would expect.
As an HR professional, by combining new perspectives on human behavior with cutting-edge data analytics and the latest digital tools, you can:
- Help your employees choose the right benefits for their families, health, and finances
- Streamline open enrollment for everyone involved
- Enhance employee understanding of innovative benefit options, such as HDHPs/HSAs
- Increase employee satisfaction with your benefits package
In the following guide, we’ll show you how to leverage science and build better open enrollment outcomes, focusing on three aspects of human behavior:
- Reaching employees with short attention spans
- Using behavioral economics to overcome and leverage common cognitive biases
- Adapting your open enrollment communications strategy to employees’ learning styles.
Related: Your 2024 open enrollment action plan.
5 Science-Based Strategies for Reaching Employees with Short Attention Spans
The constant distraction and fast pace of today’s digital lifestyle have ushered in an era of shrinking attention spans. Employees have less time to focus on researching benefits during open enrollment and less motivation to do so.
According to Aflac’s 2022-23 WorkForces Report (an annual survey of over 2,000 workers in various U.S. industries), nearly three out of five employees spend less than 30 minutes researching their benefits. This is likely one reason why, according to the same study, only 43% of all employees are confident they fully understand their health insurance plans.
With such a limited timeframe to work with and their attention being pulled in a thousand different directions, how can you help your employees better grasp their benefit options?
With the right mix of technology, communication strategies, and a deep understanding of human psychology, HR teams can adapt to this era of short attention spans and help employees make more well-informed decisions.
Here are five benefits communication strategies for overcoming distraction and short attention spans:
1. Format Content for Scannability
Using eye-tracking technology, researchers have discovered that busy, distracted readers rely on “signposts” to guide them toward the key points embedded in textual content. Dense text blocks lack these visual signifiers and may leave some readers feeling adrift. Help your employees find their way by:
- Breaking the text up into sections with subheaders
- Listing content sections at the beginning of each piece
- Keeping your paragraphs short
- Using bulleted and numbered lists
- Concluding with a list of takeaways
- Avoiding technical jargon and defining it where necessary
- Providing links for employees who wish to delve deeper into particular subjects
2. Deploy Graphical Elements Liberally
When words fail, a few well-designed charts and graphs can significantly enhance your employees’ understanding. For example, bar graphs and pie charts can help employees quickly visualize plan differences
3. Use Video Content to Explain Complex Benefit Concepts
Video excels at simplifying complex topics and holding the attention of distracted employees. A well-produced video can appeal to learners of all types with a dynamic and engaging combination of text, visuals, and sound. And it can get the job done quickly—essential for communicating with employees with short attention spans.
You don’t have to create your benefits explainer videos from scratch. Click here to explore a library of professionally produced videos covering over 80 benefits-related topics.
4. Personalize Open Enrollment with a Data-Driven Decision-Support Tool
Accurately predicting your healthcare needs for the coming year and using that forecast to compare plans requires focus, patience, and time—all of which are in short supply for employees.
A decision-support tool can significantly reduce the time commitment, burden, and frustration of researching benefits, using powerful data analytics to help employees project their expenses and select the most appropriate plan in mere minutes.
Tools like PLANselect, from Flimp Decisions, apply advanced analytical algorithms to massive claimant databases to generate personalized plan recommendations. Plan options are presented in a straightforward comparison table that clearly indicates the best-value option based on each employee’s specific needs.
With a data-driven decision-support tool like Flimp Decisions, open enrollment can be completed in as few as five minutes—a dream come true for employees with limited attention.
5. Communicate About Benefits Throughout the Year
If you ever crammed for an exam the night before only to have all the knowledge escape your brain the minute the test was over, you know that a steady drip of information almost always leads to better retention than a one-time info dump.
You can help employees with short attention spans learn by releasing helpful benefits information in digestible bites throughout the year—rather than cramming it all into open enrollment season.
Keep in mind that open enrollment falls during one of the busiest, most distracting times of the year. Other periods may provide the relative calm employees require for focusing on benefits information.
For guidance planning a year-round communication strategy, download your free 12-month benefits awareness calendar here.
Master These 3 Behavioral Economics Concepts for More Effective Benefits Communication
The intriguing and relatively young field of behavioral economics strives to answer a question that has nagged HR professionals for years: Why don’t people always act in their best interests?
This vexing problem is at the heart of your open enrollment frustrations.
For example, you know that many employees would benefit financially from migrating to an HDHP/HSA plan without sacrificing essential coverage. Yet, despite all your efforts to educate them otherwise, many insist on sticking with a conventional PPO or HMO.
Behavioral economics—a scientific field rooted equally in psychology and economics—acknowledges that people do not always behave rationally. But that doesn’t mean people are unpredictable.
Cognitive biases act as decision-making shortcuts, sometimes serving us well but just as often pushing us down the wrong path. By understanding the biases that influence their decisions, we can “nudge” people in the right direction.
Here are three common biases at play during open enrollment and how you can turn them to your advantage:
1. Status-Quo Bias
People tend to cling to “good enough” rather than seek superior alternatives. This is the status-quo bias, which you’ve repeatedly seen at work during open enrollment. Nearly 90% of employees choose the same benefits each year (according to the Aflac report cited above), even though better options may be available.
You can overcome the status-quo bias during open enrollment by reducing the cognitive load associated with researching alternatives and drawing comparisons.
For example, you can populate your benefits guide with easy-to-read charts and graphs that put essential plan details (such as deductibles, premiums, and network sizes) side by side, making it easy to contrast new options with legacy plans.
A high-quality decision-support tool can also make venturing from the status quo feel less demanding and risky.
As described above, Flimp Decision’s powerful data analytics can accurately predict an employee’s healthcare needs for the coming year with just a few basic questions. Easy-to-understand plan comparisons are available in minutes, clearly showing employees how “good enough” may not always be good enough for themselves and their families.
2. Loss-Aversion Bias
Losing something hits harder emotionally (twice as hard, some researchers say) than gaining something. So, we often do everything we can to avoid losses—even when the stakes are relatively low and the potential gains far outweigh the risks. This is the loss-aversion bias.
You can see the loss-aversion bias during open enrollment when employees worry they might lose access to certain healthcare providers if they switch to a different plan or the potential for loss if they experience an accident or unexpected illness.
Overcoming the loss-aversion bias comes down to how you frame your message. If you focus on the gains rather than the losses, employees may better see the value of plans like HDHPs. (As you know, HDHPs can bring significant gains, such as extra income with each paycheck and the tax-free spending power of an HSA.)
Visual design elements can help employees see what they stand to gain by switching plans. For example, a simple bar graph might show how HDHP savings accrue every month. A decision-support tool can help employees properly contextualize potential loss by accurately forecasting their healthcare needs.
3. The Bandwagon Effect
The bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias that tells us there’s wisdom in crowds; if it’s popular, it must be good. Of course, this is only true some of the time. What works for many or most people may not work for each individual.
During open enrollment, employees may choose options they believe are most popular, disregarding options better suited to their circumstances. Numerous employees may default to the same benefits year after year because “That’s what everybody does.”
One key to beating the bandwagon effect during open enrollment is personalization. Using a decision-support tool, for example, you can help employees see how a particular choice would help or hurt them rather than a generalized group.
You can also turn the bandwagon effect to your advantage, helping employees feel less alone in their choices by sharing stories about other people who chose and benefited from particular options. Short videos are excellent for this strategy; you can also insert illustrated stories into your benefits guide.
Using Educational Science to Help Employees Learn Better During Open Enrollment
During open enrollment (and perhaps year-round), HR team members are also educators. Your mission includes:
- Helping employees understand the benefits and drawbacks of various plan offerings
- Explaining how unfamiliar plans like HDHPS with HSAs work
- Demystifying benefits terminology
- Introducing optional benefits
- Walking employees through the enrollment process, including deadlines
As an educator, you can take some inspiration from the latest research regarding how people learn.
Many teaching experts believe that each student has a particular learning style, and, by adapting the way information is presented to these learning styles, teachers can help students absorb and retain information more effectively. The leading model is the VARK model, which describes five learning styles:
- Visual
- Aural
- Reading
- Kinesthetic
- Multimodal
You can apply the same theory to your benefits communication strategy. Accommodating all five learning styles ensures the broadest reach for your messaging.
Here are some tips for adapting open enrollment information for all types of learners:
1. Visual Learners
Visual learners learn best by seeing, preferring charts, graphs, illustrations, and diagrams to written information. Be sure to feature these visual elements extensively throughout your benefits guide, emails, and other messaging.
An eye-catching interactive Digital Postcard may also grab visual learners’ attention, as will appealingly animated explainer videos.
2. Aural Learners
Aural learners absorb information through discussions, lectures, and recordings. They are your primary audience for in-person or virtual Q&A sessions during open enrollment. You might even try recording an open enrollment podcast and making it available on a mobile platform so that aural learners can listen to it during their commutes.
(And don’t forget: Video isn’t just visual. It’s also an auditory medium.)
3. Reading Learners
Employees who prefer written material do not typically lack for educational resources during open enrollment. Benefits guides, emails, and plan documents abound.
But you can still help boost comprehension for reading learners by formatting content for easy scannability (as described above), using adaptive web design to optimize content for mobile consumption, and ensuring videos include text along with their sound and imagery.
4. Kinesthetic Learners
Kinesthetic learners learn by doing, which means they need to see how their open enrollment decisions will play out in the real world. You can help them translate benefits information to practical outcomes using a decision-support tool that accurately forecasts their healthcare needs and provides personalized plan recommendations.
Testimonials and real-world scenarios can also help your dry benefits guide come to life for kinesthetic learners.
5. Multimodal Learners
As the phrase implies, multimodal learners like a little bit of everything. In theory, all the educational tips shared in this article apply to multimodal learners. You can help them access this grab bag of resources by consolidating all your open enrollment information within a 24/7 online portal or microsite.
Multimodal learners may respond exceptionally well to educational videos. After all, videos often contain elements that appeal to all learning styles.
The Scientific Method (for Open Enrollment)
In this guide, we’ve drawn from the latest research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and educational theory to propose three science-based approaches to your open enrollment communications strategy.
As you apply these tips, don’t forget that science is all about experimentation. Science is systematic. It involves trying new things, monitoring the results, adjusting, and repeating.
You may not get the improvements you expect immediately, but keep at it. You’ll eventually discover which science-based strategies speak to your unique employee population, and when that happens—“Eureka!”