Open enrollment communication fails when it's designed around what HR needs to say rather than what employees need to understand. Closing that gap is what separates a clean enrollment from a chaotic one.
Every year, HR teams spend significant time and energy preparing for open enrollment. There are plans to finalize, portals to set up, announcements to go out, and endless questions. The same questions, in fact, that come up year after year.
It’s not the employees’ fault, and it’s not for lack of caring about benefits. But the truth is that communications are typically designed around what HR needed to communicate, not around what employees needed to understand. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where most of the open enrollment chaos actually lives.
Here’s what employees actually need from you during open enrollment:
The single most useful thing an HR team can do before open enrollment opens is tell employees what’s different this year. We’re not talking full plan details necessarily. But a clear answer to the question on everyone’s mind: “Do I need to do anything differently this year?”
Instead of answering directly, many communications present options, explain plans, and provide deadlines. All good information. But employees want to know whether they can keep what they have or whether changing that requires their attention. Making them dig for those answers causes headaches for everyone.
A simple heads-up, sent two to three weeks before the enrollment window opens, that answers this question directly does more to reduce the question volume during enrollment than almost anything else.
Benefits documentation is written for compliance, not comprehension. The language is precise in the way that legal language is precise, which is not the same as being clear in the way that a person trying to make a healthcare decision for their family needs it to be clear.
Employees don’t think about their benefits in terms of deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, and coinsurance percentages. They think about whether their doctor is covered, whether they can afford to go to urgent care when their kid is sick, and whether the plan they're looking at is going to leave them with a surprise bill they didn't plan for.
The communications that actually reach employees meet them where they are and translate plan features into real-life scenarios. They answer questions plainly and help them decide things like: What does this plan cost me if I need to see a specialist twice a year? What happens if I go to the emergency room? If I'm adding a new dependent, what changes?
Writing to those questions instead of to the plan features is what separates a communication that employees read from one they click past.
A deadline is not the same as a window. An employee who receives the open enrollment communication three days before the deadline is not making a considered decision. They’re filling out a form under pressure, probably keeping whatever they had last year because there’s not enough time to evaluate anything else.
The employers whose employees make genuinely good benefits decisions during open enrollment give them enough lead time to do so. Two to three weeks before the window opens, employees know what's coming. By the time the window opens, most of them already know what they're going to do.
That shift in timing requires earlier preparation on the HR side, which is exactly why most companies don't do it. That lead time is worth building into the process, because the downstream effect—fewer questions, cleaner enrollments, better decisions—is significant.
Every open enrollment produces situations that the communication plan didn't anticipate. Sometimes it’s an employee adding a dependent for the first time and wondering what documentation they need. Other times, it’s someone whose life changed during the year and needs help understanding how that affects their options.
Choose someone who can answer specific questions like these in a reasonable amount of time. Employees shouldn’t have to dig around for answers to questions that impact their lives. Moreover, it’s important to understand that questions of any kind are a normal experience of a workforce with diverse circumstances.
The employee who gets a same-day, helpful answer feels something different about their employer than the one who spent three days on hold with a carrier. And that difference doesn’t stay contained to open enrollment. It becomes part of how they think about whether their company actually takes care of them.
Benefits are personal in a way that most line items aren't, and people remember how it felt when they needed something and either got it or didn't.
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Brian Allen | President, evco | Managing benefits for 36,000+ lives since 2005
October exposes everything a benefits program got away with during the quieter months — and the mistakes that surface are almost always ones that started in the preparation, communication, and accountability decisions made long before renewal arrived.
The most useful thing a CFO can do before October arrives is get specific about what they actually know going into renewal. If you can answer these questions, you’re in a different position than most.
What most employers don’t realize is that the renewal conversation they’re having in October was largely decided before it started. By the time you see the number, they’ve already done their homework. September is when your homework needs to happen.