Open Enrollment is around the corner. Are your decision support tools ready to handle the strain of your employees using them to decide on health insurance and other benefits? You can run tests on the software, make sure your hardware is set up to handle this busy time of year, but until Open Enrollment kicks off and you start measuring sign-ups and engagement, you won’t know for sure if your investment was worth it.
So to understand how successful your benefits decision support tools will be before Open Enrollment starts, you have to ask yourself some questions about how your systems are set up and what exactly they provide to your employees. Let’s ask ourselves these tough questions and solve any problems before the Open Enrollment.
What Functionality is my Benefits Decision Support Tool Supposed to Have?
This is a very different question from what functionality does my benefits decision support tool provide. How are employees expected to use your support tool? Will they be able to get the information they need on benefits packages and have the ability to sign up for those benefits packages in one place? Knowing what your technology setup can and can’t do is the first step in determining what you need to improve about your sign-up systems. Then you can poll your employees and see what aspects of your support tool functionality are and aren’t working as they should. Before you add any fancy new gadgets, make sure you have all the basic features working well together.
What Worked Well Last Open Enrollment and What Didn’t?
Ideally, you want 100% engagement from your employees using your benefits decision support tool leading up to and during Open Enrollment. Depending on your organization, that might be impossible, but at least you want an improved engagement rate. Fortunately, if you ask your employees, you’ll find out which features of your sign-up system worked well from last year and which didn’t. You can use this information to either invest in another decision support tool, or make adjustments to the one you have, either with different supplemental information or different access systems.
There are many variables involved in any benefits decision. Access to information, the benefits plans available, and the ease of use of decision support tools all play a role in employee engagement and enrollment.
Getting Ready for Open Enrollment
It’s important to get employee input on how they signed up for benefits last year and try to build on those suggestions for the coming year. Investing in the right tools is only part of the battle. As an organization, you must also adjust and find ways to improve on the systems you have in place to get employees through the enrollment process and into benefits plans, particularly healthcare, that they will actually benefit from. When employees get health and benefits plans that work for them, they’re much more likely to stick around and be engaged in their work.