What is open enrollment, really? It depends on your perspective.
To an employee, open enrollment boils down to a deadline, the last chance to choose benefits for the coming year. From an HR perspective, however, open enrollment is a process that begins well before most employees start thinking about benefits and ends — if it ends at all — long after the final enrollment forms filter in under the wire.
Like any process, open enrollment can be segmented into steps. Each step must be completed before the next can begin. Taken together, these steps can consume an entire year in the life of an HR team, resulting in an ongoing cycle of planning, execution, and improvement.
The typical and essential elements of this continuous process constitute the “five Ds,” the must-have ingredients in every open enrollment campaign. The five Ds are:
- Design
- Develop
- Distribute
- Decide
- Diagnose
Let’s take each step one by one.
1. Design Your Benefits Program
An effective open enrollment campaign starts with giving your employees great options. Typically, this includes a mix of affordable and comprehensive healthcare plans (such as an HDHP/HSA, an HMO and a PPO), retirement savings plans, life insurance, and other lifestyle, financial, or health-related offerings, such as:
- An employee wellness program
- Mental health resources like access to a mindfulness app or video therapy
- Financial wellness counseling
- An employee discount program
Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all benefits program. The best benefits mix for your organization depends on your unique blend of employee demographics. You may also want to see the coming benefits year as a chance to experiment with one or two novel benefits; new options arrive on the benefits landscape every year.
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2. Develop Educational Content and Resources Around Your Benefits Package
Not too long ago, the go-to — and only — resource for learning about benefits was a printed employee benefits guide. And while the benefits guide remains a useful compendium of benefits information (albeit updated for our digital era and enhanced with visual flair), HR teams have more educational tools than ever at their disposal.
Many of these new resources expand benefits education into the online world, where employees can access them on their own time and at their own pace. Digital content also improves comprehension by allowing for greater personalization and catering to employees with auditory, visual, or hands-on learning styles.
Next open enrollment season, consider adding the following content types to your educational library:
- Short explanatory videos
- A benefits microsite or open enrollment portal
- Interactive digital postcards
- An open enrollment podcast
3. Distribute Benefits Information Leading Into Open Enrollment
If you want your employees to make timely and well-informed open enrollment decisions, creating educational content and resources about your company’s benefits package is not enough. You need to get that essential information into your employees’ hands, in front of their eyes, or in their ears.
Distributing benefits content is more challenging than it once was.
As hybrid and remote work grows in popularity and footprints expand to cover multiple states and time zones, you can no longer simply drop a benefits guide on each employee’s desk. In the era of flexible scheduling, a one-time benefits meeting will not be sufficient, either.
However, modern technology provides plenty of options for reaching employees wherever they may be:
- A virtual benefits fair
- Text messaging (nearly everyone has a cellphone, and mass-texting sees open rates approaching 100%)
- Focused open enrollment emails designed for readability
Tip: Your employees have a lot on their plates as the end of the year approaches (and short attention spans). Keep benefits top-of-mind by distributing small content bites throughout the year.
Related: Compliance 101 for mass texting employees. Read it here →
4. Help Employees Decide on the Best Benefits for Their Needs
The previous three steps have been all about the run-up to open enrollment. Step four is where the rubber meets the road. It’s time for employees to actually choose their benefits.
One thing we probably don’t have to remind you about the open enrollment process is that employees despise it. For many employees, open enrollment is a confusing and futile exercise that makes them feel unintelligent, overwhelmed, and paralyzed by their choices.
Fortunately, your HR team can ensure a tolerable and satisfying enrollment process in several ways. For starters, many content formats described above — including animated explainer videos, virtual benefits fairs, and year-round benefits communication — can help demystify complex benefits topics, significantly reducing the cognitive load around open enrollment.
Even better, a high-quality decision-support tool can make choosing the right benefits for each employee’s situation a breeze. A good digital decision-support tool like PLANselect uses an advanced algorithm and vast claimant database to personalize plan comparisons, slashing the time required to choose benefits down to a few minutes.
5. Diagnose the Results
The final step in any cyclical process is assessing the results and looking for ways to improve or streamline for the next iteration. When it comes to open enrollment, diagnosing the results typically means looking at key performance indicators such as:
- HDHP migration
- Usage of optional coverage like dental or vision plans
- Engagement with open enrollment content
Your benefit program’s success is not just about enrollment numbers, however. Qualitative metrics such as biometric data, productivity, and employee morale can also tell you quite a bit about how your benefits serve your organization.
Also, don’t be shy about asking employees for their opinions on benefits and the open enrollment process; their insights can be priceless. You can poll employees informally or using one of the many online survey tools available on the market. If you’re unsure what to ask, start with these 13 post-OE survey questions.
The Five Ds of Open Enrollment
To recap, from an HR perspective, open enrollment is a potentially never-ending cycle of building, maintaining, promoting, and improving an employee benefits package. This process comprises the five D’s of open enrollment:
- Designing a benefits package
- Developing educational content around the benefits package
- Distributing educational content
- Guiding employees through their decisions
- Diagnosing the results and making improvements