Approach Open Enrollment With A Content Creator Mindset

Renewal readiness doesn’t end after you select the right benefits program for your people.  Most employees spend less time choosing their benefits than they do picking what to watch on Netflix. Unfortunately, that’s not an exaggeration.  

According to recent findings, 67% of U.S. workers spend 30 minutes or less on benefits selection, and 89% simply keep their previous year's choices. Perhaps most telling: 53% later regret those decisions. 

For HR and total rewards teams, the root is much more than an engagement problem. It signals a fundamental problem: the way benefits are being communicated, and experienced, isn't working. 

OneDigital's Vice President of Education and Engagement, Courtney Perez, was featured in the recent World at Work piece, “A Content Creator Mindset May Mitigate Open Enrollment Shortcomings” and offers a clear diagnosis of what's going wrong and what to do about it. 

"What we're finding is that there's a communication and education gap around personalization, rather than a plan design gap or something the employer has missed. Ultimately, the lack of understanding is what causes a lot of uncertainty and forces employees to make a decision that they feel is safe rather than an election that may be the best fit." 

— Courtney Perez, Vice President of Education and Engagement, OneDigital  

In other words: employees aren't defaulting to last year's choices because they're satisfied. They're doing it because they don't have the clarity or the confidence to do anything else. 

The data backs it up. Sixty-five percent of employers acknowledge they have room for improvement when it comes to benefits communication. Satisfaction with the availability and affordability of plans has recently declined, not because the plans got worse, but because employees don't fully understand what they have access to. 

The Solution? Think like a Content Creator, Not a Benefits Administrator 

Approach open enrollment communications the way a content creator would. That means personalized messaging, storytelling, and a commitment to measuring whether your content is actually connecting with the people it's meant to reach. 

Perez highlights the importance of understanding the real differences within a workforce – going beyond the demographic categories, to hone in on life situations. For example, OneDigital's Employee Value Perception Study, found that single parents are far more worried that a medical emergency could upend their finances, while dual-income households without children are more likely to skip specialized care. A general open enrollment campaign simply cannot speak to each of these challenges at once. 

"Personalization is important, and social media plays a role," Perez said. "We live in a digital-first world. Employers should leverage technology and social media to brand themselves, not just from a marketing perspective, but from a total rewards, recruitment and retention perspective." 

Read the full World at Work article here.  

For more on Open Enrollment readiness, visit OneDigital’s Open Enrollment Hub.