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Open enrollment can be a challenging time, and may be even more so this year with 42% of the U.S. workforce working remotely. We recently hosted a webinar on this topic discussing the anticipated challenges and ways to address them. Here are some of the takeaways, you can also replay our webinar for more comprehensive coverage on this topic.
1. Communicating Effectively
With close to half of the U.S. workforce working from home, a large number of open enrollment meetings will take place virtually this year. Even the most organized open enrollment meetings may feel less conducive due to potential at-home distractions. Just picture kids yelling, dogs barking, and WiFi dropping. These distractions can cause the presentations and Q&A sessions to be less effective, leaving some employees confused about the process.
While nothing can replace the effectiveness of face-to-face communication, some ideas to address the communication gap include hosting multiple open enrollment sessions and sharing a recorded replay of the meetings. Some businesses are also offering dedicated virtual HR office time and the ability to set up one-on-one meetings to help address employees' questions. Frequent reminders about upcoming deadlines, infographics, and how-to-guides can also be very helpful for employees, and will make the process smoother. Effective communications is the right balance of synchronous and asynchronous communications.
2. Visibility Into Progress
During open enrollment, the HR team has a lot on their plate - from fielding employee questions, to making enrollment changes, to staying on top of progress. It’s a busy time, as well as a potentially error-prone one. To help manage the process and ensure that no details fall through the cracks, EverythingBenefits recommends implementing a digital solution that tracks your company’s open enrollment progress and provides status reports to remove the guesswork about where your team is at.
With EverythingBenefits' enrollment solution, you can easily identify where everyone is in their enrollment process, and send automated notices to remind them to complete the process.
3. Benefits Support
One of the biggest challenges for employees is figuring out which benefits are right for them and their families, especially in light of the current pandemic. With less or no face time, employees can be left in the dark about what benefits others are choosing and what is right for them. One of the coolest features of EverythingBenefits' enrollment solution is the integrated AI-powered personalized benefits recommendations tool that helps employees take the guesswork out of choosing benefits. The solution correlates the demographics of employees and dependents against over 900,000 critical determinant factors representing decisions and outcomes by millions across the country that share similar characteristics. Having this tool right inside the enrollment platform can help eliminate employees' indecision and stress associated with selecting their benefits and also take the burden off of HR.
These are some of the recommendations that we shared in our recent webinar. You can replay it at your leisure for more comprehensive recommendations or reach out to us to discuss your organizations unique needs. We hope this years' unusual open enrollment season goes smoothly and seamlessly for your team!
