Annual Enrollment Pre-Game: HR’s Home Run Strategy
There’s no crying in HR! At least not with this strategy to a surefire win this annual enrollment season.
Stay tuned for all the highlights, analysis, and exclusive interviews from benefits experts on how HR can maximize ROI, save time, and use technology to streamline open enrollment this year. Play ball!
First Base: Maximize benefits ROI
Getting to first base means getting all the key players in the right place, setting the stage for a home run. First, ensuring employees have all the benefits they need. Hopefully, you’ve done your research on your benefits line-up to gauge employees’ preferences and needs, and now employees just need to know their options.
Annual enrollment is an opportune time to maximize ROI with tools like decision support for this reason. Decision support is like a coach’s playbook, it provides valuable insights into employees’ state of mind, understanding, and risk tolerance to help plan future benefits offerings. And, helps guide employees based on the answers they give. So the plans they are recommended are personalized to their unique situation.
Another way to maximize ROI is through dependent verification, where automating the verification process saves money and stress for both employees and employers.
Second Base: Save time by being proactive now
First, analyze last year’s annual enrollment. Take a look at last season’s highlights. Reevaluating employee feedback collected last year may be a great place to start to identify what worked well and what didn’t.
Then, determine the best forms of communication to optimize the communication strategy this year. If employees don’t have dedicated access to a work computer during the workday, then text message reminders about open enrollment may be a better option. For some, personal email has a better open rate than work email, and the best way to capture that preference is by asking the employee within the benefits administration platform itself. Plan now to get employees to enroll before the deadline, and save time spent on late enrollments.
According to our 2023 Benefits Insights Report, 85% of employees are confused about their benefits. Benefits literacy is going to remain low—the sooner we accept it, the sooner we can proactively anticipate what employees are going to ask and meet them where they are in their moment of need. Or better yet, provide them with the tools they need to self-serve…
Third Base: Use technology to streamline annual enrollment
AI has been a hot topic so far in 2023, and the best is yet to come as far as developing tools like ChatGPT to enhance our lives. Using artificial intelligence like our personal benefits assistant, Sofia, has fielded millions of employee questions and resolves nearly 90% of them. With her latest enhancements using ChatGPT, she’s only getting more effective. Having a team player like Sofia should be a #1 draft pick.
Other than the amazing humans in HR, the technological MVP of open enrollment has got to be the platform itself. And more importantly, it must be user-friendly. User experience (UX) is both an art and a science. But if you were to ask our highly educated Consumer Experience team, they would probably tell you—it’s more science than art. Using years of UX data and research, as well as best practices in communications, our Consumer Experience team creates an enhanced annual enrollment experience for the employee, allowing HR teams to focus where they’re needed most.
The bases are loaded, are you ready for AE? If you’re still feeling unprepared, check out the Selection to Activation report for more insights. And exclusive interview recap with a panel of experts.
