Open Enrollment Considerations in Light of COVID-19

By Kisha Moliere

For many employers, the spread of COVID-19 required that onsite company operations be suddenly shifted to teleworking due to social distancing. While much has been written about the operational challenges brought on by the pandemic, it is important that we not overlook the impact social distancing may have on this year’s upcoming annual benefits enrollment.  Below, we have compiled a list of considerations and tips to help you move forward with your open enrollment, even with stay-at-home orders in place. 

The Importance of Keeping Current Employee Contact Information

It has always been best practice to keep your employees’ contact information up to date. Unfortunately, many businesses had not, and were subsequently left ill prepared to communicate with employees when “Stay-At-home” style orders were enacted.  Developing a strategy to collect and periodically update this information is a must moving forward.  Consider letting annual enrollment play a role in this strategy by:

• Requiring employees to log into your benefit administration (ben admin) system each year.  There are many advantages to mandating that your employees review and sign off on their benefit elections, inclusive of them being able to review and confirm their current contact information.
• Having your ben admin vendor to set the contact information screen as required for new hires and each enrollment period, and require employees to confirm their information before proceeding to elect their benefits.

Tip: If you allow employees to make contact information changes in your ben admin system, be sure to extract those changes and update them in your payroll/HRIS system as well.

Altered Methods of Benefits Communication/Education

In the past, your company may have printed and handed out benefit booklets at group meetings in the conference or break rooms.  Your employees may have even had one-on-one meetings with HR or enrollment counselors.  Unfortunately, these options may not be available for this year due to social distancing.  Now more than ever, your employees will need to understand the features of their benefits package (including medical, disability and EAP).  You’ll need to develop a strategy to communicate and educate them with social distancing in mind.  Consider a combination of the following:

• Mail – While this is always an option, it may be cost prohibitive to mail benefit booklets to your entire population.  Consider sending post card enrollment reminders instead, with some other methods of communication as well. 
• Email – If you have been diligent with securing and updating valid email addresses for your employees, this may be an affordable way to send benefit information.
• Video/Conference Calls – Establishing video/conference calls, using tools such as WebEx, to conduct group meetings with your employees is a great option that allows you to present the information as you normally would.  Tools such as Skype can help facilitate one-on-one virtual meetings with employees to answer their specific benefit questions.
• Uploading Benefit Booklets – Uploading your benefit booklet to your company intranet and/or ben admin software can be an extremely cost efficient way to share the information.  Tip: You’ll want to ask if your ben admin software allows you to post booklets specific to different employee populations (if applicable) since benefits, contributions and/or eligibility may differ amongst employees of different locations, classes, lengths of service, etc.
• Embedding Company or Broker recorded videos – Find out if your ben admin software allows embedded videos in the user interface.  If so, consider recording (or having your broker to record) your open enrollment meeting, and integrate it into the enrollment experience.
• Decision Support Tools – If you are making major changes to your health insurance benefits (such as adding High Deductible Health Plans), consider utilizing a decision support tool during this open enrollment to assist your employees in their benefit decisions.  Inquire whether your current ben admin platform has this technology, and if so, if there are additional costs to activate it.  If not, consider stand-alone tools provided by companies such as Jellyvision.
• Call Center Capabilities – Your ben admin vendor and/or broker may have relationships with call centers that can handle benefits education telephonically.  This could substitute nicely for employees accustomed to one-on-one enrollment sessions.

Challenges for Benefits Enrollment

Many employees are accustomed to completing paper election forms and then submitting them to HR for electronic processing.  Others may be familiar with self-enrollment through the company’s ben admin portal, but have always done so via onsite, company computers.  Neither of these may be possible this year.  The following options can help overcome these hurdles:

• Employee Self-Service – Does your ben admin software have an employee self-service feature that you aren’t utilizing?  If so, this is the time to speak with your vendor about what is involved in standing this feature up.  Also, is the site “mobile responsive”? In other words, if employees don’t have access to home computers, can they access and enroll on the site via their smartphone/tablet? 
• Mobile Apps – Does your ben admin software have a mobile app that allows for benefits enrollment?  If so, this can be very beneficial for remote employees without access to a computer and/or strong internet connection.  Tip: Inquire about push notifications, as this could supplement your benefits communication strategy.
• Call Center Enrollment Support – As referenced above, speak with your ben admin vendor and broker to see if they have arrangements with a call center that could handle enrolling employers via phone.  If so, are all calls recorded and are conversations documented in the employee’s ben admin record?  What are the costs? Tip: Speak with your broker about offsetting call center costs with worksite benefit enrollments.

Taking action on the above will set you up for a successful open enrollment, even with social distancing measures in place!