Post-Open Enrollment Checklist for Benefit Overachievers

Are you an HR admin or benefit professional who loathes the phrase “good enough”? You’re in the right place.

With open enrollment in the rearview mirror, now is the time that separates good benefit professionals from the BEST. While everyone else relaxes, complete this post-open enrollment checklist to join the top 1% of all benefit professionals.

1. Review the invoice for errors.

We’re not going to sugar coat it—this is going to be boring work, but it’s worth the effort. When you get your first invoice from your carrier, take the post-enrollment data file and check the accuracy of the bill line by line. This will ensure all charges are correct, and you’ll be able to identify errors as early as possible, saving you countless headaches for the year to come.

2. Survey employees on their enrollment experience.

Let’s face it, the time between open enrollment and the new year is a dead zone for work, so there’s no better time to survey employees. Ask employees if they understood their options, how easy the enrollment process was (this will help you if you’re on the fence about switching platforms as well), and if they know how to use their benefits. Make the quiz fun to maximize engagement, and the data you gather can help jump start your planning for next year.

3. Have a chat with your broker.

Using your enrollment data and the information you gathered from the employee survey, talk to your broker about what went well and what can be improved. Discuss how this year’s employee engagement compared to last year, and home in on what could have accounted for the rise or fall. Your broker should also help you do a cost analysis of benefits year-over-year.

4. Communicate to employees how to use their benefits.

Employees who use their benefits value their benefits, and right after open enrollment is a great time to begin educating employees on how to get the most from their benefits. Why? You just battle-tested every communication channel in your arsenal. Use your data from open enrollment to double down on whichever channel produced the best results.

One Final Tip:

As you run a postmortem on your open enrollment engagement data, you may discover your email open rate fell flat. Poor engagement may not indicate low quality content; instead, it may be a signal of a mismatched communication channel.

Given the new work environment we’re all adapting to, your employees may be experiencing email fatigue. Test this hypothesis by offering video office hours for employees who have questions about their new benefits. And if you’re worried your current video conferencing provider can’t handle your compliance needs, try SwellChat—the only video conferencing tool built specifically for benefit professionals by benefit professionals—free for two weeks.

PS: Take a victory lap. No matter how this past OE went, you made it, and because of you, your employees have access to the benefits they need. If that doesn’t deserve a high-five, we don’t know what does.