Getting employees informed, engaged and enrolled in their benefits can seem like an insurmountable feat. Employees sometimes ignore important emails regarding their benefits and wait until the enrollment deadline to ask questions. These 11 guiding employee benefits communication and enrollment questions can help you gauge your current communication efforts to find areas of improvement.
11 Employee benefits questions employers should ask themselves
When thinking about your communication efforts, know that not every organization is the same. Some organizations may have more bandwidth than others, making it easier to generate materials or assist employees with their questions. Take a moment to reflect on your communication efforts and answer the following questions:
- Does your organization regularly send benefits descriptions to employees at least one month before open enrollment?
- Does your organization conduct in-person or online benefits meetings with employees prior to enrollment?
- Do you provide open enrollment resources and materials to employees? If so, how many and what do they cover?
- Do you provide resources that preempt questions? If so, what do they cover and do employees find them helpful?
- Do you offer health and wellness communications on top of your traditional benefits information? If not, why?
- On a scale from one to ten (with ten being the highest), how well do you think employees understand your benefits?
- What method(s) do you use most to communicate employee benefits, e.g., email, mail, flyers, payroll stuffers, etc.?
- Who is your dedicated point person for benefits questions? Who else can be an additional resource in your organization?
- Do you offer more than one method for answering employee benefits questions, like in-person or online office hours, a designated email address or a distributed questionnaire?
- How often do you refresh your employee benefits resources?
- How often do you review the effectiveness of your benefits communications?
Next steps for employers
Now that you’ve taken the time to go through these questions, you should have a better understanding of your communication efforts. You may want to take these initial questions a step further by having your team answer these questions as well. From there, you can review your answers and start discussing what’s working, what’s not working, potential goals or new strategies.
You can also do your own research or reach out to a trusted source, like HANYS Benefit Services, to compare your efforts. This can help you measure current efforts while considering new ideas.
If you have questions or need help implementing what you brainstormed, contact HANYS Benefits Services today! Our dedicated team of experts is more than happy to go through your answers, provide you with potential solutions and generate an employee benefits game plan.