AI can superpower HR through open enrollment busy season

As summer turns to fall and open enrollment approaches, every head of people and HR team member knows to brace for the busy season. For most of the year, benefits are an afterthought for many employees, but as the time to re-up or change their health insurance arrives, employees have questions. Lots of them. And they ask them all at once. Sound familiar?

Here’s the thing: Open lines of communication are essential for the modern workplace. Transparency is a priority across departments, but HR teams must work especially hard to make certain that employees are maximizing the benefits of their benefits package. In a perfect world, every employee would be taking a hard look at their current coverage and planning around any known upcoming life changes. If you’re planning to grow your family or if your circumstances have changed, reach out to your HR rep to walk you through your coverage.

Even if an employee is sticking with the status quo, it’s always worth taking the time to take a peek. However, I don’t need to tell you that we don’t live in that perfect world.

Obviously, those of us in HR understand the value of making benefits packages work for you. We’re laser-focused on that part of the business, but it’s important to remember that the average employee spends much less time thinking about their coverage. Certainly, employees should know the details of their company’s offering—benefits are a meaningful part of their compensation package, after all—but 85% of employees report that they don’t fully understand their coverage.

Knowing that an overwhelming majority of employees do not understand their benefits package opens the door for innovation and technology to assist HR teams in closing this gap. Over the years, I’ve seen several different tactics used by various HR teams to better break down the offerings, such as in-person and virtual benefits fairs, office hours where employees can ask questions and an anonymous email box for individual requests. While these have been successful in the past, it’s time to level up how we can help: enter generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Something I’ve been part of rolling out in my current position is a Slack channel, powered by AI, that is open to all employees to ask questions about their coverage. While, of course, our team’s door is always open, this provides an instant response while freeing up time and resources for HR professionals to focus on other, more strategic projects.

Here are a few of the early findings on why AI works so well for benefits questions:

First: Many of the questions asked as open enrollment approaches are standard and oft-repeated. But HR reps don’t know until they take the time to open the email or DM. Once they do, they still have to take the time to respond. Newfront’s internal data has shown that 50% of all queries around open enrollment were repeat questions. A chatbot is expert at answering these standard questions, which allows HR experts to tackle the more tricky edge cases and give them the time they deserve.

Second: A meaningful percentage of employees will not take the time or effort to ask HR questions. Reaching out to a human is a hurdle for some; if the question isn’t pressing, they’ll put it off or never ask. A chatbot within your company’s standard work Slack instance lowers the barrier to entry. If minimizing the number of employees who are uninformed about their coverage, increasing access to information is key. AI is great for that!

Third: An AI benefit assistant can save time for HR, which allows the team to dive deep into solving difficult problems. Newfront’s internal estimates find that using an AI chatbot can save HR teams up to four weeks per year of work answering duplicate questions. So, think of it as AI-as-triage; if there’s any question it can’t answer, it connects a worker to an HR rep.

Open enrollment will always be a high-stakes moment for HR teams. Employees are reporting that each year when it comes to open enrollment, weeding through jargon-heavy documents and unclear language causes them to stick with their current plan, even if it’s not the right fit. Regardless of how much we push, employees are busy with other things all year and it’s unlikely that they’ll make the selection of their health coverage a year-round project anytime soon. AI can empower your HR professionals to save time and solve most pressing and high-value problems for your employees, making open enrollment a little less busy for your team.

Related: Nearly half of CEOs believe their jobs should be replaced by AI

AI is not the only solution for streamlining the open enrollment process, and I do not believe it can or should replace the humans in HR—we are experts at untangling the deep, knotty problems that employees face. We can talk through future life changes and empathize with employees while aiding them in selecting the perfect plan for their coming year. But, if we can do that while leveraging AI to give us more bandwidth to assist even more employees, that’s worth exploring.

Paige Maisonet, SHRM-CP, head of people at Newfront