Open enrollment season: Lessons from Black Friday shopping
Here are a few tips for HR teams and benefits professionals to make next season, and the entire year, a little bit less stressful and more productive.
Open enrollment is the Black Friday of knowledge management. The stakes are high, deadlines are looming, and even the most coordinated, well-oiled machine can’t anticipate every hiccup. Now that we’re all working from home, questions that are usually asked around lunch tables are being peppered across Slack channels and Zoom chats. And forget about any paper handouts, everything is somewhere virtual, in some link—you just have to find it.
On top of all of that, we’re talking about health care. During a pandemic.
Like I said, the stakes are high.
There’s so much data and information that needs to be captured, cataloged, and analyzed during open enrollment. And aside from timelines being tight, the type of knowledge management issues experienced during this period aren’t that different from what a company experiences over the course of the entire year. Still, some companies are struggling to improve the process.
Related: Open enrollment during a pandemic: 5 invaluable lessons learned
Here are a few tips for HR teams and benefits professionals to make next season, and the entire year, a little bit less stressful and more productive.
Take a page from retail’s book
Retail companies know that Black Friday is the biggest day of the year for them—in some cases, it can be 20% or more of their annual revenue. With so much hinging on this one day, you can guarantee that, at any given moment, commerce companies know whether they’re hitting their numbers and KPIs. Now think about the last time you and your team set specific, quantitative KPIs to measure success. The KPIs for open enrollment are definitely different than commerce, but the methodologies are definitely related.
It’s important to note that retail companies aren’t doing all of these calculations on their own. They rely on a suite of sophisticated technology tools to help measure, track, and report on performance. Here we hit the most common roadblock: how do I decide which tools are right for my team and the company?
3 questions to help you identify the right technology
The answers to these three questions will guide you to make the best decisions about your technology providers:
- Does your company data live on premises or in the cloud?
- Are you part of an HR department that’s one of many?
- Could you easily surface all the information about your employees in a couple of spreadsheets?
Open enrollment creates a fork in the road for many teams—open enrollment technology or benefits administration tools. I recommend the former for smaller, more agile organizations and the latter if you’re working in a large organization with higher turnover. Be sure to clarify which administration and enrollment tools insurance and health care providers connect to so goals can be tracked without worrying about involving IT.
KPIs for open enrollment
Before selecting a technology tool, it’s important to identify exactly what’s most important to the organization. The last thing that we want to do is implement technology without understanding even the most contextual goals. Employee experience departments may need to evolve their thinking to begin the process of identifying the right metrics and analytics to drive success.
Here are a few metrics that your team should consider tracking:
- Employee engagement with open enrollment content
- Percentage of enrollment by a certain date
- Cost savings for employees with new health plans
- Issues and questions raised by internal stakeholders
Putting numbers to open enrollment allows HR teams to not only see cost-effectiveness rise, their jobs would also get easier because the employees they represent would be happier and overall their company would see less attrition.
There’s also an opportunity here to create a knowledge base of answers to common employee questions that your HR team can use repeatedly for every enrollment cycle. This doesn’t have to be a fancy tool, but it takes some of the load off of your HR team so they can easily answer repeat questions that occur and focus on more complicated concerns.
Employees are the customers of knowledge management
One more commerce analogy before you go. The knowledge management tools that are built to serve your employees should be just as useful and effective as the technology that powers your experience as a customer outside of work. Your employees are the customers of your knowledge base—make it easy for them to use, and simple for you to measure how well it’s working. Ensure that you’re modernizing your systems and creating diligent analytics disciplines to help you navigate your next “Black Friday.”
Lesley Heizman is knowledge manager at Lucidworks.
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