Benefits March 3, 2021

How Companies Successfully Ran Virtual Open Enrollment in 2020

Many are continuing the practice in 2021 and continuing to use different types of communications to reach employees.

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Plan sponsors learned valuable lessons from holding virtual open enrollments last year.

“2020 was a year like no other on a personal level, professional level, emotional level and physical level,” said Gabrielle Marroig, vice president, enterprise, large markets and health insights, at Benefitfocus, during a webinar hosted by the firm. “When everything is uncertain, everything that is important becomes clear. Human resources [HR] professionals quickly realized that communication to participants would be key and that they would need to be adaptive and creative to succeed in that.”

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Jessica Borchik, senior director, benefit catalog advisors, at Benefitfocus, said that in spite of the financial pressures many companies experienced in 2020 due to the pandemic, they made it a priority to secure best-in-class insurance products for their employees. “They wanted to ensure that they were offering the right benefits to their employees,” she said. She added that Benefitfocus suggested that companies use positive themes for their 2020 virtual open enrollment efforts, such as “thrive” and “flourish.”

That certainly was the case last year at American Eagle Outfitters. Tammy Fennessy, director of benefits at the retailer, said the company wanted to ensure that its associates working in 1,000 locations in North America and Asia knew that the company cared about them. “One of our bigger messages last year was on keeping premiums flat for a second year in a row,” Fennessy said. “We also wanted them to know we were offering virtual telehealth at 100% coverage.”

American Eagle used virtual open enrollment and held live webinars to educate its associates about the options available to them, she said. For those working in stores without access to a computer at work, American Eagle taped short videos they could then view on their own time, she added.

This year, American Eagle is continuing its virtual benefits fair and, like last year, making accessibility to signing up for benefits available year-round.

As far as what advice she would give to other HR professionals, Fennessy said, “Be nimble and use different media to reach different populations.”

Baptist Health in Montgomery, Alabama, decided to keep its benefits consistent in a tumultuous year, said Anna Dempsey, human resources team lead. “As the health care industry was incredibly hard hit by the pandemic, our most important objective as we went into open enrollment was to present our 5,000 team members with something that wasn’t going to change and that was consistent and familiar. Consistency became our main objective—not rolling out something big, new or unknown.”

Baptist Health promoted its virtual open enrollment with email blasts every two to three days and with posters in the elevators and reminder cards on top of the tables in every break room, Dempsey noted.

“We also made it a point to reach out to the managers to alert them if an employee hadn’t signed into the open enrollment,” she said.

Borchik agreed that sponsors should use different types of media to reach different demographic groups and noted that while “human resource teams sometimes feel that a text message might be a little invasive, text messages have become a key means of communicating and are a medium HR teams should seriously consider.”

She said companies also might consider small perks to entice people to virtually enroll in their benefits, such as a $5 Starbucks gift card or a T-shirt.

Benefits March 3, 2021

Understanding Employee Health Data Can Help Decrease Costs

Data can inform plan sponsors about what benefits to offer as well as how to steer employee use of benefits.

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Recent webinars hosted by Benefitfocus discussed links between health and wealth and how plan sponsors are accommodating participants on both fronts, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

High-cost health claims can increase an employee’s financial worries. According to Transamerica data, 43% of workers surveyed were distracted by finances at work, with 34% of those workers saying their health had been impacted by financial worries.

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Plan sponsors that discuss these concerns and encourage employees to be healthy add to their bottom line by decreasing employee health care costs, said Jeffrey Caldwell, vice president of strategic partnerships at Transamerica. More than four in five employed adults in its study said they would have a greater commitment to their companies if their employer offered additional benefits to improve their health and well-being.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that employers that are strategically clear with their health care programs often see dynamic improvements in the workplace,” Caldwell said.

Plan sponsors that focus on health and wealth are often more likely to implement other benefits that they would not have been considered before, including life insurance, supplemental health benefits, and executive and retiree medical and retirement benefits, Caldwell added.

Understanding employee demographics and participant data can also help increase participation in benefits. Employee demographics were the focus of a second Benefitfocus webinar, “Digging into the Data: Case Studies in Controlling Health Care Costs.”

Rachel Uhrig, a senior financial analyst at Assurance Agency, noted that through examining data, her company has found fewer employees are needing emergency care due to COVID-19—down 10% compared with 2019. The company has instead been able to offer and encourage telemedicine. “This is due to a mind shift in going from in-person to online care. People are realizing that we can get the same services online that were once in person,” she explained.

Tamara Warn, a clinical analyst consultant at USI Insurance Services, said she noticed an increase in telemedicine as well, especially for mental health visits. She added that in the data she has seen, more employees are suffering with depression and anxiety, likely as a result of COVID-19. “Some of it is due to people worried about layoffs, if they will go back to work, and a lot of stress and anxiety in that,” she said.

Other companies are leveraging their data to pinpoint which programs best suit their employees’ needs while mitigating high-cost claims. American Eagle Outfitters partnered with Cigna to create a holistic program focused on physical, financial, emotional and social well-being with an emphasis on behavioral health.

Anthony Jarusinski, benefits manager at American Eagle, said the data and onsite health coaches Cigna offered have helped the company identify which health areas to focus on. “We notice if there is an uptick in pregnancy, hypertension, heart disease, etc., and there are programs within our TPA [third-party administrator] to help mitigate risk and high-cost claims,” he said.

Focusing on what the employee demographic is battling now decreases the chance of high costs in the future and reduces stress among employees, Jarusinski added. Because of the program’s success, the company has been able to maintain flat employee contributions throughout the past two years. “Through these programs, we are getting the engagement we need and that is reducing our claims cost,” he continued.

He urged companies to study participant data and offer voluntary benefits, even if the employee workforce seems healthy. As an example, he said American Eagle offers a program that allows employees to test for different genetic diseases, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer.

“If you go status quo and believe that everything is going well, you’re going to be met with some problems down the road as chronic conditions pop up,” he said. “Make sure you have some access to your data to make sure that you know what’s going on with your employee population.”

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