How to guide employees through open enrollment season

It’s open enrollment season for many employees. And hopefully, it’s not the first time this year that they’re hearing about electing benefits.

“We should be talking about enrollment in the summertime,” Melissa Foster, VP and head of enrollment at Prudential Group Insurance, said during a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast. More specifically, “August, if not July.”

Why so early? Because it’s “not just checking a box,” Foster said. It should be viewed as “a strategic moment to actually engage with employees and get them to understand all the work that goes into building that total rewards package.”

Foster discussed the importance of open enrollment, and how HR pros can make the most and best of it for employees, with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

What exactly is open enrollment, and why would you consider it to be such a critical season for both HR teams and employees?

Open enrollment is that annual window when millions of employees review and update their employer-sponsored benefits for the following year. So to me, it’s like a look-back period to think, ‘Okay, I have time to reflect on what my benefits were last year, if they’ve worked well for me or make changes for the future.’ Because I know, oh, maybe next year I’ll be having a baby or I want to buy a house. So I need different benefits to support that.

How important are deadlines when it comes to open enrollment?

There’s so much behind the scenes work that goes into allowing employees to make these decisions that it’s really important to have a really clear timeline so that you can meet those deadlines to get out things like insurance cards and have all your payroll files working and ready to go for whatever your coverage effective date is.

I know some HR folks tell the truth about the deadline. And there are others who tell a little corporate white lie. What say you?

I think it’s 100% best practice to leave that time at the end of the enrollment that we call a silent enrollment period. That helps when anybody’s going to come back…and say, ‘Oh, I never saw the emails.’ It gives them that opportunity to log back in, enroll. It’s something you’ve already decided on and alerted your benefits technology or your HRIS system so that they’re aware that we’re going to give them a chance and then start the file process and all the things that have to be done post-enrollment there.

I can understand how sometimes employees may feel that, as HR, we are sending too many things. What are the best practices and tips to have those conversations without making it feel like it’s overbearing or stale?

This is a concern across the board…if you have a place where employees are going consistently, and a proven channel of communication where it doesn’t feel like yet another benefits message, but it just feels like part of that already, that communication channel and ecosystem that you’ve built for your company, that’s really the best way to do it.

Let’s just say I’m not a specific benefits person, but everyone in my company is looking to me to explain it. What would you advise me to do to be more educated?

I would say lean on your carriers. Lean on the people that are providing you those products to your employees to help understand and educate you on all the ins and outs of them, the value. There’s so much material out there that carriers want to share, and they would be more than happy to do knowledge-sharing sessions for managers. The other thing that I’m a huge fan of is insurance industry events…So to be a student of the business, a student of the industry, and just keep that knowledge fresh, I think is really, really important.

For more from this conversation, tune into the People Person podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, or watch it below.