ClickCease

Get our new Comms Calendar with dozens of communications ideas and monthly themes in our 2024 calendar. Get it now →

Log In        1.888.612.3881

Five Must-Do (Simple) Steps to Increase Employee Engagement for Open Enrollment

Chip Arndt

Chip Arndt

Executive Vice President

Human Resources strategy meetingHuman resource departments spend LOTS of time and money educating employees on core and voluntary benefits offered to them by their employer and ensuring employees sign up on time, or risk losing those benefits until the next sign-up period.  Strategies to get employees to sign up include: snail mail reminders, table tent notices and posters in office common areas, in-person meetings, “mandatory” group meetings, emails, tackling employees as they walk out the door for the weekend, and the list goes on and on… and expenses go up… and UP… and employees and HR departments get more and more frustrated.

Here at Flimp Communications we’ve heard it all and launched effective strategies with companies to save time, money, and aggravation for employers and employees, whilst making the process relatively fun and almost painless for everyone.  

So let’s get to increasing employee engagement during open enrollment in a timely and cost-effective manner while deepening relationships and ongoing communications with employees and their families throughout the year.

Strategize and Set Goals

Understanding what you want to accomplish with employees throughout the year is critical to understanding and analyzing whether your benefits communications program is successful during, and after, implementation.

We encourage your team to create concrete goals for any employee communication, such as getting 75% of employees to engage with your video communications, Digital Postcards, and video explainer brochures about open enrollment and then having more than 50% of those viewers enroll soon thereafter without having to meet them in person or via video chat. You can read our case studies here for more inspiration.

Communicating with employees should be creative and fun! People react and respond to any communication differently. 

There is no one way to get an employee to react. Thus, we suggest creating a benefits communications program that includes a variety of methods including employee text messaging, Digital Postcards, videos, online resource centers, virtual benefits fairs and QR codes.

Plan, Prepare, and Prime

HR planning notebookBe it open enrollment, core and voluntary benefits, health and wellness education, or employee events, it is essential to prepare, prime, and position (our three Ps) your benefit communication six to 12 weeks before drop-dead deadlines to ensure that employees ACT on your messaging and enroll.

Plan (also referred to as project management) how long it will take and what team members and vendors need to be involved in creating an effective benefits communication program.

Prepare whatever above methods you choose. It is essential not to rush any part of your program and provide enough time for senior executives to review, edit and finalize all content for any video communication.

Prime how often do you want to message employees (well before deadlines) to ensure employees are fully aware of what’s coming and have time to share everything with their families before acting on your final deadline.

Implement and Communicate

Flimp Communications provides a wide variety of video production capabilities (70+ core and voluntary benefit topics video library in English and Spanish, semi-custom, and custom videos) and our hr communications platform provides the ability to quickly build, send, and analyze content-driven employee communications. And it’s built for non-designers and non-techies so you can do all this without any marketing or IT assistance.

With Flimp, you have the tools, platform, and team to ensure you’re interfacing with your employees and their families effectively anywhere, anytime and on any device (smart phone, tablet or computer).

Follow-Up and Analyze

Immediate: Always thank people and recognize them. Just as you like it when your boss says thank you, so do your employees. Plan a post-enrollment benefits party for people to share what they did and have some fun.

Monthly: Continue to follow up monthly or weekly if needed. No one replies the first time you ask unless they KNOW they have to, or there’s a firm deadline.

Analyze: See what’s happening daily with your benefits enrollment campaign and watch how employees are interacting with your communications materials. We track and report back to you on the results such as overall, engagement, time on content, video starts, mobile views, etc.

Keep at It – Consistency Wins

All marketers know that pay-offs, sales, and brand exposure come when people are reminded that your company and product exist.  Remember the phrase out of sight out of mind?  Well, communicating with and reinforcing good employee relationships is no different. When employees see that you are communicating with them throughout the year in a helpful way this leads to happier employees, who are now better educated and informed to make the right decisions for their families. The benefits communications campaign you create is valuable as an overall communication asset for your company and it is not static.  Build upon it. Improve it. Nurture it.  Each year your program will improve and your employees, colleagues, and bosses will thank you for it.

Do you have questions or are you wondering how you can leverage our expertise and products for your company for open enrollment or year-round employee communications? Connect with us here.

 
New call-to-action

Subscribe to our blog for HR tips, templates, and inspiration

Join 2,000+ other professionals from the human resources industry.
Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin

Other content you might like:

Free Google Survey

Get your post-OE survey now

Just give us your email below. A member of our team will create your survey on Google Forms and then add you as an editor. From there, it’s very simple to edit and launch!


    Regularly updated

    Subscribe to our blog for HR tips, templates, and inspiration.

    Join 2,000+ other professionals from the human resources industry.

    Loading