COVID-19 changes to enrollment likely here to stay

Employers’ recent experiences navigating COVID-19 enrollments are making them even more open to virtual meetings, web conferences and video meetings. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Just about one year ago, COVID-19 brought abundant and unexpected changes to our world. The voluntary industry – including carriers, brokers and vendors – was forced to change the way we do business and did an outstanding job responding to these events.

Enrollment is one of the tasks that has probably been most impacted by the world’s events. While we had been moving towards virtual enrollments (i.e., online enrollments) for some time, COVID-19 forced us to accelerate that change. This year, most enrollments were virtual and used a variety of techniques and tools. Most people expect that we will no longer utilize in-person, face-to-face meetings to the same extent that we did pre-COVID-19 and that virtual enrollments are here to stay. That’s not necessarily bad news, as long as we make sure that we don’t make virtual enrollments mean passive enrollments!