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Keys to a Successful Open Enrollment Season

Open enrollment season is upon us again, and the world of work continues to shift at a head-spinning pace. This fluid environment poses benefits-related challenges that HR leaders can’t afford to ignore. For example, decision-makers are wondering:

  • How to address employees’ evolving needs. It’s essential now to meet individuals where they are and provide clear pathways to benefits that resonate.
  • How to communicate effectively in a “work anywhere” environment. Everyone deserves easy access to clear, relevant benefits information, regardless of whether they’ve returned to the office, they’re working remotely, or their schedule blends both work modes.

Why Benefits Education Counts

To illustrate how important education is for a successful open enrollment season, consider these U.S. health benefits research findings:

  • 72% of employees wish someone would tell them the best health insurance for their particular situation. (Justworks/Harris Poll)
  • Nearly 90% of employers think their benefits are clear and easy to understand. Yet only 65% of employees agree. (via MetLife)
  • 54% of employees don’t know the full scope of their health benefits. Yet nearly 65% say these offerings significantly influence their willingness to stay with an organization. (Justworks/Harris Poll)

This means education is vital—not just to help people choose relevant benefits. The truth is that, without effective benefits education, you’re putting employee retention at risk. But improving open enrollment communication doesn’t need to be overwhelming. Below are a few simple ways to help employees through the decision-making process and ensure better overall results:

5 Ways to Improve Open Enrollment Education

1) Host Multiple Information Sessions

Conducting a single all-hands open enrollment season meeting no longer covers all the bases. Even if 100% of your employees work on-site, you can’t expect full participation. Some people will be out ill or on vacation. Unavoidable business priorities will keep others from attending. It’s smart to plan ahead and assume conflicts will make it impossible for everyone to join a live session.

You can rise to this challenge by producing content in various formats (for example, an in-person meeting, a live webinar, a digital recording, and a series of podcast episodes). You’ll also want to share this content through multiple delivery channels (for example, sending email messages, sharing in Slack groups, and posting on your organization’s intranet platform).

The goal is to make information easily accessible and available whenever people can fit it into their schedules.

2) Plan Open Enrollment “Office Hours”

To augment your core benefits “broadcast” content, consider offering prescheduled office hours with an HR staff member. You can structure and promote this as an opportunity for individuals to drop by in person or online and discuss their specific circumstances with a benefits expert.

Often in public information sessions, employees hesitate to ask questions about what they don’t know. But office hours provide a private safe space for discussion. This frees employees to speak more openly about their specific concerns. At the same time, it helps the HR team provide more relevant information to ensure individuals understand the impact of their open enrollment choices.

You may also find it helpful to extend the value of these sessions by repurposing the content for broader use. In other words, you can select some of the most common questions from “office hours” visits and repost them anonymously as “frequently asked questions” on a wiki or web page.

3) Get Your Vendors Involved

Sometimes, information is best received directly from the source. Hosting virtual live and recorded benefits fairs gives vendors a platform for sharing details about their solutions and services. It also provides more time for providers to discuss specific questions in-depth with employees.

So, instead of conducting a standard 1-hour session where your HR team summarizes available health benefits, you could schedule a series of 30-45-minute sessions showcasing key vendors. (For example, you could feature each of your health insurance companies, along with sessions devoted to specialized vendors, such as onsite dental services, wellness consultants, or fertility benefits providers).

These sessions can focus on basic facts about each solution, as well as ancillary benefits that are underutilized. Then you could close each session by answering individual questions from the audience.

Also, if you’re scheduling topic-focused HR office hours, you may want to ask vendor consultants to join relevant sessions. Or you could invite key vendors to conduct their own 1:1 sessions. Sometimes, employees feel more comfortable talking to external benefits specialists. For these people, dedicated vendor sessions or 1:1 office hours are an ideal solution.

4) Integrate Micro-Learnings into the Process

Micro-learnings are brief educational events and materials targeting topics that tie in with key benefits, such as health and finance. This kind of knowledge sharing encourages more employee interaction and tends to generate deeper interest in relevant benefits.

To illustrate, here are a few micro-learning themes:

  • “Urgent Care vs ER: What’s the Difference?”
  • “The Link Between Mental Health and Overall Health”
  • “How to Balance Work Life with Family Caregiving

Top online learning providers (such as LinkedIn Learning and YouTube channels) already provide excellent educational content about these topics. This means you don’t have to create content from scratch. Instead, you can curate strong programming from several online sources and then easily deliver the content to interested employees.

Packaging and promoting this kind of useful information upfront is invaluable for employees. It saves them time because they don’t have to research these topics on their own. Plus, the convenience of “anytime” access to high-quality educational content about health and benefits enhances workforce well-being.

5) Customize Educational Materials for Various Interests

Every employee is unique. And the beauty of today’s workforce is in its diversity. So everything about open enrollment season should support this reality. In other words, it’s important to appeal to various interests within your workforce.

For instance, recent grads may not appreciate benefits that appeal to new parents and vice versa. Instead of offering a generic “one-size-fits-all” menu, think about how you can categorize benefits so they align with groups that will value them most. Then present these benefits collections on your open enrollment site as packages. (For example, you could specify “Benefits that support LGBTQIA+ employees.”)

Clearly, you’ll find overlap among groups, so you don’t need to recreate an entirely new package for each community. But structuring benefits options in this way helps people more quickly identify the benefits information they’re likely to want.

If you’ve already established dedicated employee resource groups, consider creating packages for each of those ERGs and sending a customized message to each group with a direct link to their accompanying package. This extra measure ensures that individuals can quickly and easily find materials that matter most to them.

Conclusion

As we continue to navigate today’s dynamic business and benefits landscape, this year’s open enrollment season is sure to present challenges. But continually reflecting on your communication process, seeking employee feedback, and making informed adjustments can help you move forward more smoothly.

Remember to distribute information in more than one format. Also, make it as easy to find as possible, in as many places as your budget and resources will allow. And above all, focus on personalizing communication when you can. Although this is a “broadcast” communication challenge, benefits decisions are highly personal for each employee. The more willing you are to meet people where they are, the more successful you’ll be.

8 Ways HR Teams Can Use Tech to Encourage Productivity

Human resource professionals play a crucial role in a business’s success. From designing effective training programs and ensuring a fair hiring process to strategic roles, quality HR is a key aspect of a smooth-running business.

One of the most important roles of an HR professional in 2017 is implementation of new technology within an existing organization and structure. Specifically, in addition to using technology to improve the role of HR itself, HR can incorporate technology to encourage companywide productivity.

Here are eight ways HR teams can use tech to encourage productivity in business.

  1. Streamlined Recruiting Process

Recruiting software can help streamline the hiring process for a business.

From one portal, HR can sort and accept applications, post job ads, manage prospective hires and communicate with upper management on prospective hires. This can save enormous time, compared to tracking hundreds of job applications manually. There are a wide variety of recruiting software options, catered to both small and big businesses alike.

  1. Easier Payroll Processing

Without technology, payroll processing can seem like a nightmare. A single mistake could cost the company significantly. Perhaps more than any HR aspect, technology and software is essential for more efficient and accurate payroll processing.

In addition to making human mathematical errors obsolete, an online payroll service can keep track of deductions, paid time off, paychecks and various aspects of payroll. It also makes filing taxes at the end of each year much easier, since all information is available digitally and is easily sortable.

  1. More Honest Feedback

Company culture is a big part of its success, with research showing that a positive culture boosts performance. A big part of striving toward a great company culture, as well as maintaining it, is transparency and honesty regarding any issues. Employees who are concerned about sharing feedback in fear of repercussions may be holding back vital information that can improve the company.

As a result, HR can use technology to allow for anonymous feedback from employees. Software like TINYpulse enables HR to gather anonymous feedback to gauge employee happiness, while using actionable data to help build a healthy culture. It’s a great tool for fostering a positive company culture, which is a huge part of a successful HR team.

  1. Easier Collaboration

HR departments that incorporate content management software and informatively acquaint employees with it can attain more streamlined collaborative practices.

Content management software allows most employees, or certain selected employees, to gauge the status of a project or task. They can see precisely where they are in regard to the project and what tasks they have left to complete. This can save on time and back-and-forth emails of clarification.

  1. Increased Access to Meaningful Data

With certain tech, HR professionals can give other employees access to meaningful or informative data that can make them better at their jobs. In fact, 80 percent of all data in any organization is unstructured, which is a wasted opportunity for informational efficiency.

Technology like Sapho enables HR to provide access to a variety of data, while still keeping access secure so only those permitted can see it.

  1. Less-Cluttered Employee Onboarding

New employees are obligated to fill out a variety of papers, such as W-4 and I-9 forms. This can create clutter, especially if there’s a wave of new employees.

To increase productivity of HR and new employees alike, using employee onboarding software can help the workers complete paperwork before their first day in the office. This way, they can focus on being welcomed and training on the first day instead of doing annoying paperwork.

  1. Automated Time and Labor Management

There’s no need for traditional clocking in with today’s software. HR can implement automated time and labor management software to make attendance more efficient, while also making it essentially impossible for someone else to check in for an absent co-worker.

The same software can be used to adjust schedules on the fly, preventing scheduling and time mishaps, which improves productivity in the process.

  1. Benefits Management

Full-time employees have a number of benefits that both they and HR must keep track of. Technology can aid in educating employees on their benefits, especially in regard to cumbersome processes like enrollment periods and carrier systems.

Benefits administration software helps both the employee and HR ensure all paperwork for certain benefits are filed, while also informing and educating on what these benefits provide.

These are eight areas that can be streamlined and made more productive by a savvy HR team that recognizes the vast potential and benefits of tech.

Which would you implement first?

 

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