January is here, which means open enrollment has wrapped up for HR teams nationwide. Open enrollment is a hectic time of year, so it’s completely understandable for HR teams to prefer holding off on evaluating their processes until the next benefit season approaches. However, it’s recommended to assess open enrollment shortly after it ends, while all the processes and experiences are still fresh in everyone’s minds.
As an HR professional, how do you determine whether your open enrollment campaign was a success? To answer this question, you’ll need to look back a bit and reflect on your recent campaign. Here are some questions to help guide post-enrollment reflections with your team:
- What communication materials worked well?
- What channels of communication did employees engage the most with (e.g., email, group meetings, 1:1 consultations, etc.)?
- Did employees feel confident about their choices, or were there a lot of one-off questions? If you received several questions, were there common themes?
From there, your team should review campaign metrics and analyze what specific areas of your campaign performed well and which areas could use improvement. This discussion can also be used to identify any new metrics you’d like to track for your next campaign to better determine its success. If your team isn’t currently tracking open enrollment metrics, consider starting with these figures to give yourself a baseline:
- The number of employees who enrolled before the deadline
- The number of employees who elected to enroll in a certain benefit
- The number of employees who attended at least one informational meeting
- Email click-through rates of open enrollment messages
Analyzing the concrete data from your open enrollment campaign is essential for continuously improving it, but it’s just as important to incorporate employee feedback too. Shortly after open enrollment is the perfect time to distribute a survey to your employees asking for their honest thoughts on the overall process. Having this information earlier in the year can help your team effectively prepare and make positive changes for your next campaign. When creating your survey, be sure it’s concise so that employees are more open to taking it. Here are some insightful questions to include in your survey:
- How satisfied are you with the benefits offered by your organization?
- Did you have enough tools to make informed decisions about your benefits?
- How would you rate the overall open enrollment experience?
- Agree or disagree: I have a clear understanding of the benefits package offered by my organization.
- Which existing company benefits are most important to you?
- What are the top three benefits your organization doesn’t offer yet that you would like to have?
If your organization has a self-service portal for enrollment purposes, you can tap into more employee insights using the platform. Your portal can tell you what benefits were selected most and least often, as well as provide other data points you can use to evaluate and shape future campaigns.
Assessing your last open enrollment earlier in the year not only allows for increased enhancements but also gives your team the time it needs to address any benefit and/or enrollment issues that may require more attention.
For example, maybe you introduced a new voluntary benefit and participation was lower than anticipated. Were employees unaware of the program, or did they not value or understand the new program’s benefits? The answers to all these questions can — and should — drive your communication efforts for the year ahead and inform your plan design decisions moving forward.
If your HR team hasn’t done so already, use these next couple of weeks to dive into the results of your recent open enrollment campaign. These conversations will help your team effectively fine-tune your enrollment processes and improve the future benefits experience for your employees.
At Creative Planning Business Services, we help our clients implement robust software that seamlessly manages their open enrollment needs. Contact our team to learn more about our comprehensive software and what it can do to elevate your HR processes.
