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!
Nick Rockwell and Erin Marino, Eastbridge Consulting Group, Inc. As we talked about in an earlier article, employee engagement is the key to achieving good participation and everyone wants strong participation. We have to make sure we are looking at enrollment as a holistic process, not just an event where employees sign up for coverages. Enrollment must encompass communications to educate employees on the benefits offered, articulating the needs they solve and how the benefits can be solutions for the employee. Most of these communications need to take place before the actual enrollment occurs. We will need to send multiple communications and use multiple mediums of communication (e.g., paper, digital). We also need to continue to find alternative methods to "talk" to employees as if we were with them one-on-one; in other words, we personalize the employee's experience.
Employers seem to agree. A recent Eastbridge survey showed that employers prefer to offer multiple ways employees can enroll and have personalized communications.
Employers are also open to a variety of ways to communicate with employees. The top ways that employers are willing to consider include materials and various meeting types.
Employers' recent experiences navigating COVID-19 enrollments are making them even more open to virtual meetings, web conferences and video meetings, both as group meetings and one-to-one, than is reflected in the above chart, since this data was collected early in 2020 before the full scope of COVID-19 was known. Many employers had not yet seen the tools that were developed and/or enhanced in response to the pandemic. Now that they have, they will likely continue using them even after recovery.
Employers also want to do business with brokers and carriers that will help them develop an effective enrollment strategy, now more than ever. So, let's build on our experience from our 2020 enrollments and make sure our holistic view of enrollment includes personalized communications to encourage employee engagement and education as well as outlets for employees to talk with someone. Don't let virtual mean passive.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.