Key to Open Enrollment Success? Incentives, Frequent Communication

For many employees, open enrollment is less an eagerly anticipated annual event than another item on an already crowded to-do list.

“Employees view it as just one more thing they have to do,” said Jacque Ludwig, vice president of total rewards and people operations at Collective Health, a benefits firm with about 900 employees, in San Francisco. “Employees don’t always take the time they need to really understand their plans, their options, and what it really means for them. They’re busy. They’ve got a lot going on.” 

That can create problems for employees and employers alike. When workers don’t take the time to understand their benefit options or changes to their plans, they may discover the consequences only when they need medical care — potentially finding that a doctor is out of network or that a plan works differently than they expected.

Collective Health, a benefits company itself, may have an advantage when it comes to open enrollment, Ludwig said. But even with them, getting employees to consider their benefits requires a deliberate communication strategy. 

That’s why Ludwig and Collective Health’s total rewards team prioritize open enrollment education and communication weeks before it begins. SHRM recently spoke with Ludwig about Collective Health’s approach to getting employees engaged with open enrollment.

How-to Guide: Make Your Open Enrollment a Success and Maximize Benefits 

SHRM: How do you build engagement before open enrollment actually begins?

Ludwig: We’ve got to get them to try to pay attention, so we even send reminders a month in advance leading up to open enrollment. 

We just launched Wellness Wednesdays [which offer employees tips on improving their health], leading up to open enrollment, so starting to get engagement sooner. Our open enrollment isn’t until the end of October, but we’re doing it now to get them to start paying attention to it early and often.

Then we send reminders throughout the open enrollment two-week window that we have. We’re just constantly in their face because if you tell them once, they’re not going to remember. The worst thing I want to try to avoid is folks not even knowing that they needed to enroll, and then they don’t have healthcare benefits.  

SHRM: How do you try to get employees’ attention?

Ludwig: We try to come at it from all angles as much as possible. We make announcements at our town halls where all employees are attending, give employees previews of what those changes are, and send Slack messages, post mailers to their home, send emails — all angles of communication. We put info up in our offices. We have reminders about enrollment as much as possible. 

The majority of our employees are in our offices, in San Francisco; Lehi, Utah; and Plano, Texas; but we also have remote employees, so we need to mix up communication. It’s also why we do benefits vendor sessions remotely.

The more times you repeat [information], the more employees are going to remember it. It’s important to get that engagement to make sure they’re making those well-informed decisions before it's too late. That’s the biggest goal, to really get them to pay attention. 

Also, we try to make it fun and engaging. We lean on incentives, too.

Checklist: Year-Round Benefits Communication: A 12-Month Calendar 

SHRM: How do the incentives work? What do you offer and for what?

Ludwig: We try to mix it up. We offer incentives for folks to attend our vendor sessions. We want them to be educated around our different program partners, what they’re really getting with their benefits, how they can better utilize their benefits, going deeper on the changes that we’re making. 

Our employees love swag and they love Collective Health-branded swag. So we offer fun swag for them [when they attend sessions]. It can be anything from a tote bag, a backpack, a coffee mug, things like that. And we will give them more incentive opportunities when they ask questions, entering their names into drawings for bigger prizes.

And if they enroll early, within the first week, we enter them in a drawing for bigger items like an Apple Watch, something that is really going to get folks’ attention and feels rewarding to receive. 

SHRM: Why do you think incentives work?

Ludwig: It’s important. Folks like competition. They want to be the one asking all the questions in the vendor session, so that their names are thrown in the pot more times than their teammate to win those prizes. We find that it really does work with our population. 

SHRM: How have employees responded to the incentives and other engagement efforts?

Ludwig: We’ve been doing that since I’ve been in the role, about six years, and we really have seen our engagement go up. 

We often offer open enrollment overview sessions where we go over things that my team hosts, so we go over everything more comprehensively. And we get really high attendance, with about 70% to 80% of our employees attending those. 

It’s really important to show employees exactly, “Here are the benefits you have; here’s what you need to sign up for; here’s what we cover as your employer.’ It’s really about trying to get them to understand it as much as possible.