Open enrollment season is right around the corner, but hopefully your organization has already begun work on a successful season.

This time of year is always busiest for our client service team. We field questions daily about open enrollment and how employers can implement a successful enrollment.

That brought to mind a few tips and tricks that hopefully can be of use.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

You can never have enough communication when it comes to open enrollment. If you feel like you’ve sent out enough communications within the company about the upcoming season, there’s still probably going to be one employee that forgets. Don’t let this happen.

Quick ways to communicate include:

• Emails
• In-person information sessions
• Short videos on intranet

It’s up to you, but remember, the more creative you get the more likely the employees will pay attention.

Educate as well

Communicating with employees is good. Educating them on their benefit choices is even better.

Don’t be afraid to start with the basics and educate them what a premium, deductible and out-of-pocket maximums are and how it affects them. Yes, most employees will just want to know how much is coming out of their paycheck, but making smart benefit decisions goes beyond that.

Teach your employees so they can make those decisions.

Give examples

A booklet of your benefit package design may just be a bunch of words and numbers to an employee. Those words and numbers can also get confusing.

However, if they have examples of real-life situations it can help make more sense of what they’re reading. The more simple an example – like how much they copay will be if they visit an urgent center – the better. Come up with scenarios your workforce is likely to experience.

Hold Q&A sessions

If you’re coming to us for questions about open enrollment, chances are your employees have questions as well.

Hold information sessions – and more than one – to help your employees understand their benefits. This is also an opportunity to discuss the benefit plan highlights or any changes.

After the sessions, reinforce an open door policy to ask any questions some employees maybe were nervous to ask in a group setting. Some emplyoees also may prefer the one-on-one setting.

Need a question answered? Email us at askapex@apexbg.com and your question could appear here!