HR Leaders Share Simple Ways to Make Benefits Communication Clear During Open Enrollment

The translation is what trips people up. Benefits material describes the schemes on offer, and employees arrive with a question about their own circumstances, so they have to do the conversion themselves before they can decide anything.

We write to the decision. What is in front of you this year, what has changed since last year, and what happens if you do nothing. That last one carries more weight than it sounds, because for a good number of people the honest answer is that their existing choice still fits, and saying so lets them close the email in a minute.

The timing choice that made the clearest difference was splitting the message in two: a short note early setting out what has changed, then the detail and the deadline a while later. Sent together, the changes disappear inside the pack, and the questions arrive in the final days when there is least room to answer them.

Anything about an individual's entitlement goes to the scheme provider.

We use a multi-faceted approach at our organization to make the open enrollment process easy to understand and as seamless as possible. For our company, it begins with our company-wide staff meeting. This meeting happens a few weeks before the open enrollment window begins. During this meeting, our Insurance Broker gives a presentation about the health insurance benefits for our upcoming plan year. The presentation includes information (at a high-level overview) about things that employees should be aware of. This includes items such as premium costs, changes to plans, plan benefits/incentives, etc. We also provide employees the opportunity to ask questions to our broker both during the meeting and afterwards for any personal/situation-specific circumstances. The presentation is then sent over to all employees as a reference tool. Next, we send an email to all employees with any necessary enrollment forms and links (such as for benefit summary documents). The email also clearly and concisely lays out the open enrollment dates and when enrollment forms are due by. Finally, we have a singular point of contact (our Human Resources Administrator) who employees can reach out to should they have any questions about the open enrollment process. Presenting the information clearly, allowing for clarifying & individualized questions, providing the necessary detailed resources and having a single entity that employees can contact are all components that have worked to make the open enrollment process convenient, simple and efficient for our organization over the years.

Open enrollment support at multiple facilities can be best provided through timely and personal access to both digital and face-to-face resources. As such, we decided on a practical solution by opening our benefit portal three weeks prior to the deadline while also placing voluntary HR information desks in the central administrative areas of each site. This allowed team members to ask questions about their plan choices and receive assistance with navigating the portal during shift changes, when they could most easily do so. Combined with early access to the online platform, providing on-site resources relieved stress related to deadlines for every employee, and therefore created an environment that encouraged fast processing times, fewer delays from human resource management, and high satisfaction levels among all of our employees for how well our facility manages its employee benefits.

The change that moved the needle for us was explaining one decision at a time instead of dumping the whole benefits guide on people. We lead with a single plain-English question — "How much care did you actually use last year?" — and route from there: heavy users look at richer plans, healthy years look at lower premiums. That reframing cut the "I just re-picked last year's plan on autopilot" default noticeably.

The timing decision that helped most: send a short "here's what's changing and what it costs you" note about two weeks before the window opens, not on day one. People need lead time to check whether their doctors and prescriptions are still covered before they feel rushed into a choice.

On channel, a one-page example with real dollars for a typical claim beat every long PDF or webinar — concrete numbers travel further than definitions, and they're what employees actually forward to their spouse before deciding.

Beginning open-enrollment education by emphasizing the immediate financial clarity provided by both dedicated savings accounts and employer-provided benefits is critical. The most effective way to improve open-enrollment results was by adding a clear "Overview of Financial Well-being and Savings Benefits" section to the online version of our employee enrollment process. Through this, we visually showed employees how using dedicated benefit accounts would provide them with a means of lowering their out-of-pocket costs associated with health care, as well as clearly explaining our organization's practice of providing matching funds to enhance employee contributions. By offering transparent information regarding the financial aspects of employee-benefit plans, selecting plan options became a formative experience where employees were empowered to make informed decisions about their personal finances. Our use of transparent communications resulted in higher levels of participation in available savings programs, which further reinforced our organizational commitment to promoting employee financial welfare.

We've made a shift toward an open enrollment model that is focused on eliminating technical lingo and associated confusion for employees as they make decisions about which benefits to choose. There has been one major messaging enhancement—the Benefits Glossary—that has had a direct effect on improving employee participation in our annual open enrollment. In addition to providing access to our standard portal documents, we provided a simple Benefits Glossary explaining standard insurance terminology such as deductibles, co-pays, out-of-pocket maximums, etc., using common, day-to-day language and relevant examples. By breaking down complex legal language into simple words, employees were able to make informed choices based on what was best for their families. As a result, we have seen a reduction in post-enrollment changes to selected coverage and, most importantly, positive comments from employees expressing appreciation for the clarity of the administrative communications.

Sending a simple one-page email about a month before enrollment really helps our SME clients' teams feel less intimidated by benefits. We picked this up at Patron Accounting. Bullet points, pay impact numbers, and simple icons in Hindi and English let people make decisions without getting overwhelmed. It's not the only approach, but I've noticed people understand things better and enroll on time since they know who to ask with questions.

I've learned that giving employees an open enrollment packet with a bunch of insurance jargon and asking them to figure it out on their own causes more confusion than clarity. I try to talk about benefits in terms of the choices employees really have to make: what's taken out of their paycheck, what they might pay if they need care, what a deductible really means, and who might benefit more from one option than another. One way this was done was to communicate with employees earlier. Instead of communicating the information when enrollment opened with a deadline, the information came out earlier. The employees could discuss this information with their families and come back to ask questions later. For me, I also have a brief plain-language summary like this available with the documents. It gives employees all the detail they need but also helps them understand the documents as they start. Benefits are very personal decisions, and I think employers serve people better by giving them clarity and time, not by telling them what plan the employee should pick.

Our goal is to make open enrollment easier through a grouping of employee benefit choices based on common life events, so we do not list individual insurance products. An obvious way to increase participation in selecting a plan was using “Life Stage Resource Summaries” (a guide) within our enrollment portal. The resource summaries provide examples of how benefits are commonly combined (for example, single employee preventative care or a complete family medical coverage option with flexible spending options). Framing the employee benefit product categories from a technical product-based format to a more practical application-based format provided employees with immediate recognition of which benefit structure fits best into their own personal situation. This format-based approach to presenting information provided employees with a greater degree of confidence when making their selections, created additional interest in participating in optional wellness programs, and demonstrated our organization's commitment to creating a supportive and transparent work environment.