For most employers, getting workers to pay attention to their benefits options during open enrollment has been an uphill battle. But in the wake of the pandemic, employees are more engaged than ever, and their fresh focus is on previously-overlooked voluntary options like life and disability insurance.
Pre-pandemic, employees spent an average of 17 minutes enrolling in all benefits, according to Voya research. In 2021, 56% of employees say they spent more time reviewing options than in previous years, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.
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“We've seen a huge acceleration in benefits that are portable and live with the person,” says Alex Frommeyer, CEO of benefits provider Beam, noting that workers have taken a particular interest in voluntary benefits. “We've seen increased interest in our core business, which is dental insurance as well as vision, and we’ve also seen that life insurance has had a particularly strong year because the pandemic has forced people to think about life insurance in a way they haven’t before.”
Frommeyer recently connected with Employee Benefit News to discuss the increased interest in and awareness around voluntary benefits, what benefits will be critical in 2022, and what lessons employers should take away from 2021.
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What changed in the benefits space this year, in terms of what employees started focusing on?
One exciting trend has been the emergence of and the increased popularity of supplemental health, both in its traditional definition like accident, critical illness, and hospital indemnity policies that are being used to help supplement health insurances. But we’ve also really seen new and emerging categories like mental health benefits take off.
Do you think we'll see employees offering even more of these voluntary options in 2022?
For sure, especially if they have two key features: portability, which means it stays with the employee and isn’t tied to the employer or an office environment, and digital-first is the other key feature. Digital-first has gone from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have over the past couple of years. Employers need that integration with the payroll systems and the benefits-admin tools. That’s the underlying infrastructure to do quoting, enrollments, claims processing, customer support, and member management.
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Of the benefits that we’ve discussed, which do you think will be most critical going into next year?
It’s tricky because there are multiple answers. I'm most excited about supplemental health, because I'm particularly sensitive to small employers who’ve only just started to really become aggressive buyers of supplemental health. There's something really exciting about employers being able to round out an offering that helps solve a critical problem for them in this labor market, since it's very tight, obviously, and it's changing really quickly. They are trying to attract and retain the talent they need to win in business.
What do you think the biggest lesson was for employers in 2021?
Being able to access, elect and manage benefits in a digitally native way is critical, because we're all working from home, and frankly, these days the workforce is dominated by millennials, and their expectation is that everything is digital. That's definitely been a lesson for many employers —traditionally your annual enrollment was done by walking around the office and passing health enrollment forms people fill out by hand and then go back around and collect them. That doesn't work anymore. A lot of employers have to step up their game and get serious about working with brokers who have digital tools at their disposal, and carriers that have digitally native approaches to the benefit experience.
