3 strategies for making benefits enrollment and health care navigation easier
Open enrollment offers employers an opportunity to reimagine the health benefits experience and re-engage their employees.
The pandemic has caused many employers to focus more of their attention on the holistic health and wellbeing of their workforces, ultimately placing health benefits strategy at the core of their workforce strategy.
However, achieving a healthier, more productive workforce is not easy. The U.S. health care system can be intimidatingly complex, making it tough for consumers to navigate, sometimes deterring them from using it at all. Furthermore, the exploding ecosystem of digital health and virtual care options have made it even more overwhelming—both for employers, who need to manage an average of 14 health benefits vendors (with some juggling more than 20) and for employees, who are trying to determine the best care options for their unique health needs.
Related: Complex health care benefits can have negative impact on employee wellbeing, productivity
With open enrollment just around the corner, employers have an opportunity to reimagine the health benefits experience and re-engage their employees with their health and wellbeing—not just during open enrollment season, but for the entire year and beyond. Here are three strategies benefits leaders can leverage to accomplish this.
1. Avoid the “set it and forget it” mindset
Far too often, health benefits programs are only promoted during open enrollment, leading many employees to soon forget what they elected and neglect to think about their health until there’s an emergency. In addition, employees often aren’t even aware of all the benefits available to them. This all leads to a delay in care, which can result in more detrimental health problems and contribute to rising employer health care costs. Deferred care was exacerbated even further during the pandemic.
Going forward, HR leaders need to think about sustained wellbeing—how to keep employees engaged with their health care regularly, long after they’ve submitted their benefits choices for the year. It’s imperative that they go beyond handing employees their comprehensive benefits package and expecting them to read it thoroughly, understand everything fully, and remember what’s available to them when a critical health need emerges—especially considering 73% of employees reported they don’t even understand their benefits.
Instead of limiting benefits messaging to right before or during open enrollment, find ways to communicate with employees early and often, whether it’s through a navigation platform, consistent emails, the company chat, during company-wide meetings, in monthly benefits webinars, or pinned on the company intranet. Information should be accessible, understandable, avoid jargon, and provided in all necessary languages. Employers can elevate their communications strategy even further by personalizing it to their employees’ preferences. In addition, all people managers should be trained on the benefits that are available for the holistic wellbeing of their team members and be encouraged to talk to their team about these benefits often.
2. Enable employees with better resources to simplify health navigation and benefits enrollment
The more employees understand their health benefits options, and the easier it is for them to navigate their personal health care journey, the better—it will lead to higher engagement, better health outcomes, and cost savings.
To simplify benefits enrollment and health navigation, HR leaders can do a few things:
- Tailor communications for specific employee segments: Rather than promoting every benefits program to the entire workforce, employers could take the steps to understand the health care needs of different employee segments and then send targeted messages based on those specific needs. For example, employees with Type II Diabetes would receive more outreach about nutrition and physical activity programs, whereas employees with high blood pressure would receive alerts about heart health resources. Personalization is key to engagement, as it helps employees more seamlessly connect with the right care.
- Provide educational resources and financial guidance: Low health literacy has been associated with less healthy choices, riskier health behavior, poorer health status, inappropriate use of health services, and higher costs. Make it as easy as possible for employees to understand basic health care information and make well-informed decisions based on cost and quality of care. It’s important they have a good grasp on things like out-of-pocket costs, what a deductible is and how to track against it, and what to look for when searching for the best-fit provider.
- Partner with a health navigation solution: This will make it easier to keep employees informed of new benefits available to them, as most navigation platforms can serve as a communication hub and reduce the administrative burden for the benefits team. In addition, by leveraging predictive analytics and member data (i.e., claims, biometrics, and user search activity), the navigation platform can narrow down what programs and providers should be recommended to which employees, thus avoiding overwhelming employees with a deluge of both relevant and irrelevant options.
3. Involve the C-suite
As benefits management increasingly becomes core to overall workforce strategy, critical benefits conversations must go beyond the HR team. Centering a company’s culture around employee health and wellbeing will be a lot easier if there is buy-in and commitment from the organization’s decision-makers—because change often starts at the top. As company leaders adopt a culture of health and wellbeing, so will their direct reports and their teams.
It is time for executives at the C-suite level to become more involved in their employees’ health benefits experience—and to hold themselves (and each other) accountable to making benefits strategy a top priority and understanding how it can impact all aspects of the business and the engagement, happiness and productivity of talent.
Moving forward
The good news is, employers are paying closer attention to their employees’ health and wellbeing, aiming to help them live healthier, happier, more productive lives. Benefits enrollment and health care navigation can be quite complex, but employers have the opportunity to make both much easier for their employees. If benefits leaders leverage open enrollment as the catalyst for keeping their team members engaged with their health and wellbeing on an ongoing basis, they’re likely to achieve a healthier workforce and cost savings.
Richa Gupta is chief people officer at Castlight Health.
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