After struggling to motivate employees to enroll in health benefits in years past, Whitney Stuckey, the people and development manager at real estate company the Paskin Group, saw tangible improvements in employee engagement after collaborating with benefits brokerage firm Nava Benefits during her plan’s open enrollment in June.

Strategies like consolidating all offerings into one benefits guide, making information easily accessible to employees and providing ample time to review options are recommended to plan sponsors looking to increase engagement, according to Nick Severson, a client manager at Nava Benefits.

Addressing Low Enrollment

While open enrollment season is typically a two-to-three-week period in October or November for most employers, the Paskin Group, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, starts its plan in July, requiring it to conduct open enrollment substantially earlier than most.

Stuckey says her plan needed more than 50% of its eligible population to be enrolled in the employer-provided health insurance offering to be considered a “large group” by its health insurance company. The Paskin Group is considered a medium-sized employer and currently has 86 employees.

“We had so many people waiving [benefits], because all of our plans were pretty expensive for our employees,” Stuckey says. “We were only covering 50% of the premium for all of our employees, regardless of the plan, and we had different tiers of plans. A lot of people who were waiving benefits were gambling a bit, because they were just hoping they didn’t have an injury.”

Severson explains that in California, medical benefits are “age-banded,” meaning that bands of older employees pay incrementally more than bands of younger employees if the plan is not considered a large group.

But once a plan is categorized as a large group, Severson says it becomes a more simplified, four-tier system with a fixed cost for each category: employee only; employee plus spouse; employee plus children; and family.

“This makes open enrollment easier, makes employees happier, and it’s just more plannable in terms of cost,” Severson says.

In order to be placed in the “large group” category of employers, Stuckey says she worked with her leadership team and figured out a structure the company could use to provide a higher contribution to the premium for the lowest tier of coverage.

For example, for the plan that offered the least amount of coverage, the company now offers to pay 80% of the premium, allowing employees to only pay 20%. For the medium tier, the company pays 70%, and for the gold tier, which offers the most coverage, the company pays 60%.

Stuckey says this change caused many more people to enroll, particularly in the lowest tier, and carried the plan past the 50% enrollment threshold.

“As much as you want to emphasize the [health insurance] plans and the importance of the benefit and being insured, employees care a lot about what’s coming out of their paycheck,” Stuckey says. “In the moment, they’re thinking about that biweekly deduction versus what the doctor bill is going to be.”

Now that the plan’s enrollment exceeds 50%, Stuckey is hopeful that for next year, she will have available more health benefits and more affordable health benefits.

Path to Increased Engagement

Stuckey says the Paskin Group began working with Nava Benefits in 2021 and found that the brokerage understood her predicament and wanted to help the company reach the goal of being classified as a “large group” in order to offer better benefits, all without blowing its budget.

During this summer’s open enrollment, Stuckey says Nava helped put together a benefits guide that consolidated all of the benefits available to employees. In one PDF document, the guide laid out the options for medical benefits and dental benefits, 401(k) contribution requirements, life insurance options and a page dedicated to the company’s Employee Assistance Program.

Inevitably, Stuckey says participants will be required to have multiple logins, such as for their health insurance or to check their 401(k) balance, but she found it effective to aggregate all the links to various benefit portals in one place.

“[The benefits guide] is something that we revise now every year right before we go through open enrollment, and we release that out before open enrollment even opens so that people have a week or a weekend to page through that [document] with a family member or by themselves,” Stuckey says.

Stuckey and her team also surveyed employees well before open enrollment and asked employees their thoughts about the benefits being offered and to identify any pain points. Many employees had concerns about the costs of benefits, which informed the team’s decision to subsidize more health benefits.

“Getting that engagement from [participants] proactively, as opposed to waiting to hear about it during open enrollment and hearing that people are overwhelmed or that they don’t like what they’re seeing … I think that’s really big,” Nava’s Severson says.

Severson adds that if a plan sponsor is conducting a virtual presentation about benefits during open enrollment, they should make sure the presentation is recorded and available for people to refer back to. Educating people about benefits in relatable terms is also essential, Severson explains, as some people might not know what a $10 copay means. He says providing an anecdote or story related to pieces of data will help people retain and understand the information.

“From an HR perspective, we understand this stuff because we’re talking about it every day,” Stuckey says. “Having set hours or benefits windows of time where people can come and ask questions is really beneficial.”