Mastering the Three Pillars of Open Enrollment: Communication, Tech, and Education

For many businesses, open enrollment periods can seem like a constant race against the clock. Both HR teams and employees have strict deadlines to meet, and submissions can pile up quickly, especially in larger teams. Unfortunately, without proper preparation, this time of year can feel like a scramble, often leading to administrative errors and distracted teams.

Taking control of your open enrollment planning and execution really comes down to three key pillars – communication, available technology, and employee education. When you’re able to ensure all three of these are in place year-round, you’ll find that OE isn’t nearly as exhausting or chaotic as it can seem.

Below, we’ll cover these fundamentals in more detail to help with your HR planning efforts “before” your next open enrollment period.

Transforming Communication from Reactive to Proactive

Avoiding the Last-Minute Scramble

Communication is crucial in business settings, especially during open enrollment. If communication is left to the last minute, your employees are often left confused or rushed when making important decisions about their long-term health care or finances.

Most of the time, this added pressure to make important decisions in just a 2-3 week period leads to mistakes. Employees might be using outdated information to base their decisions, or your HR teams could be flooded with follow-up questions, putting other important initiatives on hold.

The solution for getting past this last-minute scramble is to be much more proactive about benefits communications. Maintain a rhythm of reminders and notifications throughout the year as OE periods approach. This effectively extends the window for employees to consider all their coverage options and avoids the stress of making important decisions in a short timeframe.

Centralizing Information and Reminders

Leveraging a Benefits Administration (BenAdmin) platform is a great way to centralize all your benefits enrollment and educational resources within one place. It, HR teams to automate email reminders and notifications for upcoming deadlines. This keeps everyone on track without needing to manually chase down employees who haven’t submitted their benefits forms yet. 

It can also be really helpful to regularly discuss benefits-related topics in regular company meetings and one-on-one conversations. When you make these conversations more regular throughout the year, employees often don’t feel blindsided when enrollment periods begin.

Leveraging Modern Technology for Seamless Workflows

Automating Processes with Best-of-Breed BenAdmin

A best-of-breed BenAdmin platform handles the tedious parts of OE that can easily burn through HR’s time. For example, these platforms allow you to set rules-based eligibility checks, automate EDI file uploads to insurance carriers, and capture digital signatures from employees.

A significant benefit of leveraging this automation is that it reduces manual workloads for your HR teams. This not only helps them claw back time for other projects, but it can also significantly reduce the likelihood of manual errors.

Employee Self-Service and Information Access

One of the best ways to add more efficiency to your open enrollment processes is by empowering employees to help themselves whenever possible. This is another area where BenAdmin platforms can help.

Instead of waiting for HR to answer benefits-related questions, employees can leverage these platforms to locate a variety of helpful resources. They can conduct deep dive research into the details of each benefit plan, as well as access plan comparison tools that can help them to better understand the features and premium costs of different plan options.

This helps to give employees more access throughout the year regarding any benefits questions they may have and reduces the burden placed on HR teams to stop what they’re doing to provide additional basic support.

Prioritizing Employee Benefits Literacy

Making Benefits Education a Year-Round Investment 

If employees only hear about benefits instructions once a year, there’s a good chance they won’t retain much information. This can lead to a lack of engagement and a general misunderstanding of the value their benefits offerings bring to them.

Instead of having HR host an annual meeting to help employees understand what types of benefits they have and how they work, looking for ways to provide regular benefits education throughout the year can be highly effective.

There are a variety of ways you can achieve this. Providing employees access to short explainer videos, plan comparison tools and calculators, are all great ways to keep benefits education accessible all year long.

Mitigating Risk and Ensuring Compliance

Eliminate Administrative Burden Through Proactive Planning

A common issue with OE planning is being too reactive. This often leads to HR teams being caught off guard in the final hour regarding system issues, communication errors, or other problems that can impact an employee’s ability to turn in their submissions on time.

An integrated benefits technology platform can help with this by centralizing all your data and providing automation for tasks like enrollments, eligibility changes, and staying on top of OE reminders and notifications throughout the year.

This is particularly vital when using the Look-Back Measurement Method (LBMM) to track variable-hour employees. Instead of manually auditing spreadsheets to determine eligibility, modern systems can automatically identify which staff qualify for the upcoming stability period based on their historical hours.

This drastically reduces manual errors and the hours spent shuffling through backlogged HR requests. By standardizing these recurring tasks, you free up your team to focus on what actually moves the needle.

Protecting Data and Navigating Regulatory Requirements

Benefits administration also involves the handling of highly sensitive data like PHI and PII, which means your business’s security protocols need to be properly configured. Falling short of regulation guidelines like those specified in HIPAA, ERISA, or state privacy laws can lead to massive fines and broken trust. 

This is where your technology partner becomes essential. They shouldn’t just be selling you a plan – they should be helping you to ensure all your systems and HR workflows fit within the strict boundaries of regulatory bodies in your industry. 

Elevate Your Open Enrollment Success

Making your OE periods feel more seamless requires a mix of effective communication, the right technology solutions and partners, and improved education for your employees.

By following the strategies discussed, you’ll make sure you feel confident going into your new open enrollment and that both your HR teams and employees can handle their workflows effectively.

Author: Frank Mengert

Frank Mengert continues to find success by spotting opportunities where others see nothing. As the founder and CEO of ebm, a leading provider of employee benefits solutions. Frank has built the business by bridging the gap between insurance and technology-driven solutions for brokers, consultants, carriers, and employers nationwide.