Modernizing Open Enrollment: Digital strategies for effective employee communication

Open Enrollment (OE) period can be a challenging time for HR and communication professionals. Teams face the difficult task of ensuring every employee has the information they need to make important decisions about their health insurance — before that brief OE window of time closes and employees are stuck for the year.

What makes it more difficult is the variation in benefits based on state, country, union/non-union status, and languages. Teams need to ensure accurate benefits information reaches the right targeted audience. The final added challenge is reaching deskless workers during that short time frame.

For Bright Horizons — one of the world’s largest child care providers, with a 25,000-strong global workforce — deskless workers were an added hurdle.

“At any given time, 10,000 to 14,000 of our employees are teachers in the classroom who have no access to technology during the day because they are supervising children,” Bright Horizons Internal Communications Manager Jen Whalen shared at a recent Firstup customer roundtable. “Our biggest challenge was reaching them.”

Snail mail doesn’t work: Speeding up enrollment success

It’s no secret that the response rate for snail mail is extremely low — 1 to 3%, in fact. Many companies, including Bright Horizons, use snail mail to reach their deskless workers. The cost is extremely high and the return is low.

“It did not guarantee the content would get in the hands of the people who needed it,” Whalen said. “Also, it was astronomically expensive.”

Not having a way to track whether an employee has received their benefits packet has implications for key company health indicators, including hiring and retention, employee satisfaction and engagement, compliance management, and company culture.

“So when we were thinking about ways we could automate, streamline, and digitize,” Whalen explained, “our benefits process was by far our biggest opportunity.”

“We are talking almost $100,000 a year on open enrollment costs that we were able to save. So this was a great way for us to not only prove the effectiveness of the technology, but reinvest the savings into the technology.”

– Jen Whalen

Digital transformation for Open Enrollment

Recognizing the enormous cost- and time-saving potential of digitizing open enrollment, it is time to modernize the OE process. This approach reduces costs, grabs employees’ attention, and ensures the right audiences receive the information to make important medical decisions within the typically short two-week timeframe.

Read the full Bright Horizons story to learn how they saved $100k in costs by digitizing their open enrollment communications.

Here are some tips for effective benefits communication that Firstup put into practice at Firstup to achieve an open enrollment rate of nearly 100%:

1. Engaging communications: Choose a fun and engaging theme to capture attention and break through the noise, such as “Rock Enroll,” “Ready, Set, Elect,” or “Benefits Are Out of This World.” Integrate this theme into your visuals, writing, and digital signage to make your communications stand out. In a world where millions of emails and texts are sent each day, it is important to make sure your communications are noticed.

2. Hyper-personalized communications with AI audience builder: Utilize an intelligent communication platform to reach employees with the right information at the right time through the right channels. Leverage AI to quickly build audiences based on employee attributes, ensuring they receive accurate benefits information tailored to their specific circumstances, such as country- or state-specific benefits or union/non-union variations.

3. Multi-content strategy: People consume information differently, so diversify your content to engage employees effectively. Provide multiple digital formats, such as open enrollment guidebooks, FAQ sheets, infographics, employee stories, and reminder images. Additionally, offer live and recorded webinars for detailed benefits explanations, HR open houses, and Q&A sessions for a more personalized approach.

Need inspo to get started with your open enrollment content? Check out our open enrollment template library to get started.

4. Omni-channel delivery: Employees often miss communications because they are sent out in a mode that they are unlikely to see, such as an email for deskless workers or during a busy time of day. Break through the noise by using AI and intelligent communication to ensure critical communications are provided in a way the employee is most likely to consume the information, whether through mobile push notifications, emails, or platforms like Microsoft Teams. This ensures employees can access, understand, and enroll in benefits promptly. Also, consider using journey automation to send timely, tailored messages activated by employee attributes and behavior-based data. The best part? You can select a journey template, add your content, and customize with just a few clicks. If you’re new to journey automation, it is the next evolution of employee communications — think internal marketing tools for employees.

Want to learn more about modernizing your open enrollment process? Download our OE checklist, “The Ultimate OE Checklist.”