How communicators can break through the density of open enrollment

Benefits form a huge part of an employee’s overall compensation formula. With open enrollment here again, employees across the country are once again tasked with navigating an often dense package of benefits descriptions and details.

Jenn Taffaro, director of benefits at Ochsner Health System, told Ragan that one of the keys to getting timely engagement on open enrollment-related communication is being a constant presence for employees.

“You can’t set it and forget it with benefits communication,” Taffaro said. “Between open enrollment and when people can actually use their benefits, they’ll forget everything. So we just keep talking — before, during and after.”

Tips and tactics to make open enrollment comms stick

• Make open enrollment personal with humor and storytelling. Behind all of the numbers within open enrollment’s benefit plans, there’s also a story to be told. Tara Davis, senior director of internal communications at The American Psychological Association, told Ragan that her team leaned into open enrollment’s Halloween-adjacent kickoff with a messaging campaign. “Last year, we did a Halloween video in our weekly email — ‘Don’t Let Benefits Enrollment Scare You!’ — with some light jokes about confusing acronyms and scary paperwork,” Davis said. “People loved it. It got more clicks than any of our other benefit reminders.” Davis added that her team has also constructed guides to help managers push their reports in the right direction in case they get confused about the onslaught of benefits-related information during open enrollment. “We’re building out what I call our ‘choose your own adventure’ playbooks,” she said. “If you’re a manager with an employee going on parental leave or who’s lost a loved one, you can follow the steps in the guide — what to do, who to tell and what resources to share. It takes away that panic of not knowing what to do in a sensitive moment.”
• Make dense information feel real. For a lot of employees, the information contained in a benefits plan description feels confusing and even scary. It can be difficult to understand what these plans look like in practice. But communicators can help make it more tangible. “We’ve built our benefits communication around moments that matter — having a baby, caring for a parent, sending a kid to college,” Taffaro said. “Those are the times people actually listen.” She added that her team also adds a to-do checklist to every open enrollment-related piece of communication. “It’s always, here’s what you need to do, here’s when you need to do it and here’s what happens if you don’t. Simple as that.”
• Get the timing and method right. Open enrollment offers a small period of time to handle important paperwork that can shape the year ahead. Davis said that her team spreads its awareness campaign out over a few weeks to give people time to get a handle on everything being presented to them. “We offer information sessions a week before open enrollment starts — so people can digest it, compare plans and ask questions — and then again during the enrollment week, because we know some folks don’t pay attention until it’s due,” she said. Taffaro added that her team takes an old-school approach to information sharing to help reach people where they can think about the impact of benefits the best — at home. “Mailing the benefit guides to their homes is huge,” she told Ragan. “People can sit at the kitchen table with their spouse, go over what’s changing and decide together. That’s something a PDF can’t do.”
• Create pathways to make information easier to find. Davis and her team know that remembering the details of benefits can be tough. That’s why they work to make it easier. “We know people don’t retain everything, so we keep our FAQ pages on SharePoint really nimble,” Davis said. “We can update them instantly — and we do. As soon as a new question comes in, we add it. Then, in our daily email we link straight back to it. People learn that it’s the place for the latest answers.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.