This open enrollment season presents challenges and opportunities when it comes to employee education and engagement—but that doesn’t mean it can’t be effective. In fact, it may be a very welcome change for employees.
This year, we have an opportunity to look at the way we educate our employees in a whole new light. While we won’t be packing employees into a conference room to listen to a traditional enrollment presentation, if you have a benefits portal, you have a tool at your fingertips that will make enrollment meetings easy, engaging and effective. Best of all, you can do this meeting virtually.
Best Practices Tip: As a back-up to live webinar presentations, record a quick tour of your portal highlighting new options, plan changes, and other important items. Make this available on your intranet, e-newsletter, push it out via email, and send text messages reminding employees to watch.
Using your portal to guide the conversation, allows you to focus on time sensitive changes to the plan and demystifying underutilized or misunderstood plan features and tools. This is also an opportunity to challenge employees on how they can take control over their own health to become better, more engaged consumers of their benefits. Focus on the call to action, which is enrollment.
If you feel employees need something in their hands, make it easier on yourself by giving them a flyer highlighting changes and other important items, while encouraging them to visit the portal for more information.
Best Practices Tip: Pick a limited number of important things to focus on. You don’t need to talk about everything at once. Remember, you have the other 11 months of the year to share information.
- Tell them 2. Show them 3. Let them experience it
A great way to structure these virtual and recorded events is to tell them what they need to learn and how any changes impact them, what they need to do, and what tools and resources they have access to. The next step is to show them how these things work and where to find the information they need. Finally, you ask them to try the tools themselves. This real-time guided experience is one of the most effective methods for engaging employees with their benefits.
This strategy has many benefits for employers, employees and benefits advisors alike. These include:
- Employers can track employee engagement, and with your help, take action to address issues and opportunities as they arise
- Employees gain greater familiarity with the benefits portal, mobile app and enrollment platform by actually visiting it during enrollment
- Employees’ lives are simplified to focus on the most important changes without wading through a bunch of pages to find it
- Benefits advisors and their teams do not have to spend countless hours producing benefits guides and can instead focus on client service and innovative employee communications
The Touchpoints team can show you how to use your benefits portal to conduct open enrollment meetings.