7 Tips to Increasing Open Enrollment and Engagement

Increase Open Enrollment & Engagement

Open enrollment season is the window in which your employees may add or drop health insurance and make changes to their coverage. Increasing engagement from year to year is crucial to the success of your programs. Make an impact with your employees and drive engagement to an all-time high with these tips:

1. Clearly communicate dates to your employees. Your employees are busy and may often overlook emails that you deem as important. This being said, make sure you clearly communicate to your employees, well in advance, of the enrollment period. Provide detailed information upfront on plans and healthcare options, with dates they should know. You may even consider sending periodic emails leading up to enrollment, during enrollment, and as enrollment deadline approaches. A calendar reminder is another way to show emphasis on dates, or even a quick call or check in with employees to see if you can help answer any questions on their mind. The fear of the unknown or perceived complexity can often be a deterrent or reason for procrastination.
2. Create engaging benefit planning meetings for all employees. Provide personalized experiences to your employees based on their age segmentation when planning your benefit meetings. Offer several time options allowing for flexibility with schedules and choose locations with engaging experiences to draw your employees in. Games, door prizes, raffle drawings, food, and incentives are other ways you can entice engagement and attendance at benefit meetings.
3. Ask employees what they want. What do your employees value when it comes to benefits and their healthcare options? Are wellness programs intriguing? Do they prefer simplified offerings or more complex? In preparation of open enrollment, consider sending out a survey to get a feel for what your employees would like to see or issues that interest them. Reaching out and taking initiative for feedback will provide general knowledge to management and may help you enhance your benefit offerings. By reaching out and involving them in considerations, you’ll also get your employees thinking about what they value and provide education prior to open enrollment.
4. Provide simple and engaging resources. No one has time to read fine print or even read between the lines, so make it as simple as possible for your employees. Create a few simple, yet useful, videos, quizzes, and graphics to help make the difficult benefit decisions easier and less stressful. Focus on the pros, cons, and costs of each plan.
5. Continue the benefit conversation. Once the official enrollment period is complete, keep the conversation going. Touch base with your employees several times throughout the year regarding best practices and consumer healthcare education. Tips and tricks on how to reduce costs or ways they can utilize existing tools to manage their healthcare funds are all reasons to have a conversation with your employees. Along the way they’ll learn valuable information that may even cause them to switch something up next year.
6. Call out the tax and investment advantages. Many are unaware of the tax and investment advantages that a Health Savings Account solution offers. In your efforts to increase open enrollment engagement, provide tools and resources highlighting the triple-tax advantage, what this means for them, and how HSA funds can be invested as a retirement savings vehicle.
7. Put emphasis on creating goals and tracking progress. By placing an importance on creating savings goals and tracking progress, making smart benefit and healthcare decisions may seem more intriguing to your employees. With online and mobile tools, such as the HSA Central Mobile App, your employees have access to manage their HSA funds and view account information at their fingertips. With the ability to view dashboards and track their progress on their terms, you’re giving them the resources and knowledge to make educated health decisions.

We’re ready to help you create your own open enrollment strategy. Empower your employees today with the education needed to make their own benefit decisions as seamless and hassle-free as possible.

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