Open Enrollment Dos and Don’ts
Open enrollment season is almost upon us, and in my most recent LinkedIn Live, I discussed benefits enrollment, specifically these three topics:
How you say things
What you say
How you guide employees to resources
Read on for my dos and don’ts on these topics!
How You Say Things
“Can you come to our enrollment meeting? You’ll be fourth in the lineup. We’ll be reviewing all the benefits, so I’m guessing you don’t need to come until about 45 minutes after the start.”
Woof.
Can we? Yes. Will anyone remember anything that I say about the plan? No.
This “back-to-back” method of providing benefits information to employees makes it incredibly hard for employees to remember who is who, who provided what information, and who they need to ask about certain issues that come up long after the meeting is over. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been asked about health insurance, life insurance, and other non-retirement plan issues. This leads us to our first don't:
Don’t put presentations back to back. We know companies do it this way to minimize the time employees are not on the job, but at least spread the presentations out over a few days so that the information provided has time to really sink in.
Another thing we’re not a fan of here at RPI is long meetings. Generally we talk for 15-20 minutes, with 10 minutes for questions. Our new clients are almost always surprised when they hear this – they’re used to presentations that go on for an hour (or more). People have short attention spans.
Don’t have long meetings. Think about how much information people can absorb in 15-20 minutes, and stick to that length of time. You won’t be able to cover every single thing you need to in that time frame, but that’s okay - you can drip out additional information to employees later on (but before the enrollment deadline, of course). That leads us to our first do:
Do chunk your benefits information into bite-size pieces that employees can handle. For us, this means talking about why you save for retirement, how the plan works, and how you can sign up or get more information. It all ends with a call to action: either enrolling or getting the employee to sign up for a one-on-one meeting with us. And, don’t confuse employees with multiple calls to action. You want to streamline the whole process as much as possible, not send them to a decision tree with four outcomes or steps to take.
So how do you design an enrollment meeting? You need to have a specific call to action, clearly stated deadlines, any default actions that will occur, etc. Make the process as frictionless as possible, and if they need to fill out any forms, allow them some time to do that at the end of the meeting so that they can be at least 90% done with the form before they leave.
Inertia is real when it comes to signing up for benefits. It pays to remove as many hurdles as possible for employees with default options if they don’t take action. There was a great study back in 2005 that illustrates this point where researchers put everyone through retirement plan education meetings. Immediately after the meeting, 100% said they intended to sign up, but only 14% did. The takeaway from this study? Education does not equal action -- don’t just have a meeting, throw a form at your employees and expect them to all sign up.
Do reduce friction in the enrollment process. Make it as easy as possible for your employees to sign up for their benefits and/or set up defaults for what happens if they don’t take action.
What You Say
Word choice really does matter. You want to connect what each benefit means to the employee and how they will actually use and consume it. In terms of retirement plans, it means reiterating the fact that if you want to retire on your own terms (whatever “retirement” means to you), you need to start saving now so that you’ll have that paycheck in the future.
Do make sure that the language you use resonates with the employee. For younger employees, retirement is way in the future. You need to use the right language to convince them to start saving for retirement now. For others, there is no such thing as retirement; they plan to keep on working after 65. The right words will help to encourage them to save for their later years so that they can have a choice on how they want to spend their time later in life.
If you’re using vendors, make them run their presentation by you so that you can make sure that your employees will understand it. After all, if your employees don’t understand their benefits, or don’t think they’re relevant, they won’t appreciate them and you’ll be missing a big return on investment.
Resources
There might be multiple touchpoints for how you need to deliver information, which can create the opportunity for different types of resources. One such resource might be a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section on an intranet. You’ll want to consider tailoring the resources to different employee profiles, e.g. employees earlier in their career will have different questions than those nearing retirement.
When considering the benefits education process, do think about how different employees will best absorb the information, which benefits will be most relevant to them, and how you can best disseminate the information from a resources standpoint to help guide people through the process. Creating the right resources targeted to different demographics can go a long way to help employees through the enrollment process.
Takeaways
Bottom line: You want to make it as easy as possible for employees to take the right actions when it comes to benefits enrollment. That means:
Having meetings that are short and to the point
Making the information easy to understand and consume
Making sure the language you use resonates with employees
Creating targeted, easy-to-use resources
Reducing friction as much as possible throughout the entire enrollment process
Do you have questions about how you can position your retirement plan into an asset that employees are eager to sign up for? We can help - reach out to us here or email us at hello@retirementplanology.com.