Most employers use PowerPoint slides to communicate during Open Enrollment. This is fine to do, but you want to make sure you don’t fall into what’s called “death by PowerPoint”. Aim to meet the benchmark of 10 slides, 20 minutes, and 30-point font. 

• Record: You will never get all employees in one place at the same time, but you can ensure they don’t miss out. 
• Engage: Incorporate polls and prizes.
• Answer questions: Employees will have questions, so make sure you allow plenty of time to address them.
• Catch attention: Use visuals, video, and sound to catch attention and keep interest.
• Humor / Humanize: Use humor and humanize your content to make your presentation both relatable and engaging

Make sure your messages are noticed by leveraging the tools and channels employees are actively communicating in. Over 80% of employers reported using three or more methods of communication during open enrollment in 2021. A PowerPoint presentation likely isn’t enough; you will likely need more than one communication approach to reach employees.

Channels to Consider

They say that employees need to hear a message an average of seven times before understanding it. However, make sure you don’t overload your employees with too much information. Doing so can lead to confusion and make it more difficult for them to make informed benefits decisions. Instead, highlight the most crucial information and leave time for questions and discussion. By taking this approach, you ensure your communication is informative and productive.  

Proper overcommunicating is about regularly delivering information that’s important, straight to the point, and sent at the right time and to the right people.

As you look at your approach to communications, you may want to consider opportunities for personalization and/or segmentation. Both can help in getting employees to see the value and not overlook critical information or benefits.

• Personalization ensures employees have specific and relevant details. For example, you might have details on what they enrolled in last year, which could serve as a reference for what they may want to enroll in this year.
• Segmentation uses details or factors about an individual to focus your message on a specific audience. This might align life stages with certain benefits. Or if you know employees have dependents, you might create a message regarding the benefits that appeal to families such as dependent care, childcare location services, or family counseling services. By contrast, you may have individuals later in their career that have a need for retirement readiness services.

In an ideal scenario, you are combining both personalization and segmentation. However, this can be challenging and time-consuming to coordinate, so you may want to just take the first step and try one or the other.

While multiple and bite-sized communications are often a key to getting through to employees, there are also benefits to providing a centralized location for all your benefit information. It becomes a go-to reference for employees to quickly access resources and learn a bit more.

The thought of creating a centralized resource can be a bit daunting and might create flashbacks to the times where a 150 page benefits guide was the go-to approach, but it doesn’t need to be complicated or overwhelming.

There are multiple opportunities to centralize the information and resources employees will need. This can be your payroll/benefits site, an internal site (e.g., SharePoint, Intranet, teams file shares), or a shared network drive. The key is to use clear descriptions or naming conventions and keep things organized and up-to-date.