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Let me explain further: One of the biggest misconceptions that I have to address early on is an in-person vs. virtual meeting. If you're like any other client that I've ever onboarded, you're very much used to scheduling a group meeting where you arm wrestle your employees to come into a big conference room or break room. You might do three, four or five of them. You might do them at every location if it's a bigger group, and if you're like most of my clients, it's a pain to schedule and
People typically don't always
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When I say it that way, 100% of the time, they're like, 'Oh my gosh, you're so right. It's so awful.' I explain that's a very archaic way to do it. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just very old school. So, my goal is to bring them to the new age.
What I suggest is more of a hybrid approach, but we do it virtually. COVID, good, bad or indifferent, helped our cause. We were doing this before COVID, but candidly it was harder to convince somebody of the value in it. Now that we're post-COVID and more in a virtual world where nearly everyone has smartphones, a tablet or laptop, we can direct-message all the employees with a link to Zoom, Teams or whatever platform is chosen. They don't have to be on video. They can dial right in on the phone and listen on their timeframe.
We can schedule a handful of these meetings throughout the week. We can do 10. It doesn't matter to us. We'll record all of them. We'll pick the best one, and we'll upload it to our client's custom benefit website where employees will have 24/7 ability to share the benefit with their family. Benefits are a family decision, so we want to get them involved.
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Bite-sized video clips
We're going to record the meeting. It could be 40 minutes. It could be an hour. I don't care what it is, but the time doesn't matter. Instead of uploading an hour meeting to the micro site that employees and families have access to, what makes the most sense is we cut up the video into bite-size pieces based on the actual benefit.
Let's say eight minutes were on medical insurance. We will clip out that part and make that its own link. That way, someone who's looking only for medical can click on it. Let's say the next six minutes is pharmacy, we'll also have a link just to that video. Then the next video may be on employer-funded life, followed by accident, critical illness or pet insurance. Everything will have its own individual link.
In the year 2025, why should we make an employee scroll and suffer through a video that's an hour long because they want to hear the minute and a half clip on how pet insurance works? I would much prefer to clip that out and literally have it hyper focused on a link where all they do is click on what they're interested in. Same thing for dental and vision.
It's kind of like on YouTube where you can click on different chapters of a video, so you don't have to watch the whole thing. It's much cleaner than a one-hour video. Nobody's killing trees. Nobody has to print out material that people never look at again, and it's all right there on the custom benefit website, along with the PDF document of the same material that you would have printed out before.
Another issue to consider is email. Most employers will only send out an email blast saying it's open enrollment. But people will respond quicker to a message on their phone as opposed to emails, which either go to spam or are one of 500 emails piled up because everyone doesn't check email the same way that they check a text. Most people don't want to see that little red dot on their iPhone or Android device that shows they have a message. Now, we don't tell employers not to send emails. The more communication, the better. I always explain that we take an omni-channel approach when it comes to marketing.
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Shorter is sweeter
It's also critical to be cognizant of the length of open enrollment. Most employers schedule a window that allows employees to make a decision up to an entire month. That's way too long! What always happens is that a bunch of type-A personalities will make their benefit selections on Day One to get it out of the way. Then you see very little to no movement at all over the next three weeks. And at the very end, you're begging people to enroll, and if they do it, it's all on the very last day. This is ridiculous. There's no law that says it has to be so long. That's insanity. Think of the time and aggravation you and your clients could save by confining open enrollment to just one week.
Next, never start an open enrollment on a Monday. I've done it a billion times. Mondays are crazy and chaotic for everybody. Everyone hates Mondays. Even people who work weekends will still say they hate Mondays. It's just a natural thing. So, my patented go-to open enrollment timeline is Tuesday through Monday. Start on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, run it to the following week and always give one full weekend for open enrollment in the middle so employees can sit down with their families and make a decision together.
Lastly, be more thoughtful and daring about the actual timetable. About 70% of all open enrollments for small, midsize, large and mega companies take effect on January 1. It's the dumbest thing ever. That's why people in our industry always joke about the fourth quarter being so crazy. It's crazy because we brainwashed employers into thinking that everything has to be clean. It's absolutely untrue.
Why not remove that ridiculous pressure in Q4 when employees are distracted by Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's, and instead do it during an off-peak season when the company isn't busy? Whenever I suggest that to a client, their reaction is always the same: 'I didn't know you could do that?!'
