Post Open Enrollment Checklist

If you had to make a list of some of the topics that are crucially important to both employees and employers alike, healthcare would undoubtedly be right at the top.

For workers, it's a major factor that they consider when deciding where to work. For business owners, it's how they attract and retain top talent. Regardless, it's not something to be taken lightly - especially as open enrollment approaches.

Open enrollment is the annual period when employers can update their employee benefit offerings and employees can make changes to their elections for the upcoming year. During this time, employees can adjust their plan, waive coverage, add dependents,  and make other changes without needing a qualifying life event.

How to Prepare for Open Enrollment

For business owners, open enrollment is a perfect opportunity to reassess their current offerings in a way they may not have had the chance to do for quite some time.

Work with your broker to look at your current plan's benefits and make sure they still align with the overall goals of your workers. If you identify any gaps, compare them with other plans to see if you can fill them. Do the same in terms of premiums and even out-of-pocket costs.

Essentially, you need to make sure you still understand the needs of your workers and that your healthcare offerings are still meeting them. If they're not, open enrollment preparation becomes comparing plans until you find the right one to accomplish your goals within the context of this year.

Supporting Your Employees in the Open Enrollment Period

By far, the best thing to do to support your employees in the open enrollment period involves opening a channel of open and direct communication as soon as possible.

Let people know that they can come to their HR Department (or an employee benefits partner) with any specific questions they might have. Make sure you provide educational resources, host an open enrollment meeting in person or virtual, and share other materials so that people understand what is being offered to them and why it is in their best interest to consider it all.

Send regular emails and other messages to let people know when open enrollment dates are coming up and when certain deadlines are happening. People lead busy lives and they may forget on their own. They'll appreciate the reminders, especially considering that it is all so important. It can be a good practice to have open enrollment education meetings recorded if they are on a video conferencing service, that way any employees who weren’t able to attend can still get the information. 

A good benefits broker can offer individual assistance. Part of what makes a successful healthcare plan involves personalization and an employee may not be able to get to that point on their own. So long as you provide them with what they need to help to that end, they'll be able to take full advantage of everything that you have to offer.

Steps During Post-Open Enrollment

Never make the mistake of assuming that post-open enrollment is somehow less important than the actual enrollment period. Just because most of the deadlines have passed doesn't mean that there still isn't work to be done.

The post-open enrollment period is a great time to solicit even more feedback from your employees so that you can find out what worked, what didn't, and what you can do better next year.

Just a few of the important steps you or your broker will want to take during this time include but are not limited to:

• Double-check all employee enrollment forms to make sure that the provided data is accurate.
• Submit all enrollment forms to the carrier by the associated deadlines.
• Confirm changes have been made with the carrier.
• Administer all employee health plan notices as per the rules and regulations stipulated by the Affordable Care Act, COBRA, and others.
• Confirm with employees that they have received all necessary documentation, like their health insurance ID cards.
• Proactively monitor employee engagement to make sure that people are taking advantage of the health plan that you've already invested so heavily in.
• If employee engagement is suffering, solicit feedback to see if you can determine why and what to do about it next year.
• Sit down for an advisory session with your benefits broker to discuss how things went.
• Continue to provide employees with resources relating to education and awareness in terms of their benefits in an effort to increase engagement even more.

Key Takeaways for Successful Open Enrollment Periods

Healthcare and benefits in general are a massive expense for any employer - but they're also an important one. Happy, healthy workers are more engaged on average, which makes them more productive as well.

But you don't want to offer people access to health insurance that won't help them. You need it to be a plan that meets their needs and that they'll end up using. Selecting plans with that in mind, and keeping an open line of communication with your employees so that they can always vocalize their opinions, is a bit part of how you accomplish precisely that. The same is true of your ability to acknowledge that this is something you have to "get right" year after year. It never stops being important.

AEIS is Here to Help With Your Open Enrollment

At AEIS, we understand just how important open enrollment is to your ongoing success as a business. One of the major things that a robust benefits package is supposed to do is prevent employee churn. If the process is long, frustrating, and convoluted, employees won't forget that - and it may be one of those things that causes them to disengage from the workplace.

We don't want to see that happen to you, which is why we're proud to step in and assist with open enrollment and all other benefits-related needs you may have. We can leverage our decades of combined experience to your advantage, allowing you to enjoy all the advantages of this process with as few of the potential downsides as possible.

If you'd like to find out more information about how to create the perfect post-open enrollment checklist to meet your business needs, or if you have any additional questions that you'd like to go over with someone in a bit more detail, please feel free to contact the team at AEIS today.