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Congratulations, benefits professionals! You’ve accomplished another year’s open enrollment! Whether you survived or thrived, you have an opportunity to lead your organization’s benefit evaluation.
It’s time to charge full speed ahead with your open enrollment aftermath strategy. By analyzing what went right and what could be improved, you can help ensure an easier, more effective process for next year. This will help you take actionable steps to collect, analyze and act upon data from four key groups:
With data from these four groups, you’re on your way to all the information you’ll need to improve your benefits strategy for next year.
But let’s take this seemingly monstrous task and break it down into manageable chunks. Rather than looking at every group, let’s start by focusing on the first and the most important, group you need to survey.
Who should you survey?
Start by delivering an open enrollment survey to both your benefits eligible employees AND the dependents they have listed in your system. Some employees might designate a spouse or other family member to perform benefits enrollment tasks on their behalf. You want your true end-user to be able to provide feedback on their overall experience.
What should you ask?
The open enrollment survey questions you ask largely will depend on the goals you are trying to measure. If you have not defined any specific goals, then start by focusing on the enrollment experience. For example, what did your employees like and what do they want to be different for next year? Regardless of the type of questions you ask, make sure to keep the survey brief — no more than 5 questions — and ask only the information that will help you take actionable next steps.
Where should your survey live?
Most organizations are going to find that creating an online survey is the most effective way to collect, store and analyze data. The easiest option is to use a free survey tool and distribute the survey link to your employees through email. If you go this route, double-check your survey tool to make sure it is mobile-friendly and offers robust analysis and reporting tools. For organizations with robust research and analytics teams, approach peer leaders in these areas to explore access to their research and analytics tools.
Pro Tip: If you work in an organization with a population of employees whose job functions do not allow access to a computer with ease during the day, you may want to deploy a hybrid approach of both online and mailed paper copies of your open enrollment survey.
When should you survey?
In an ideal world, you would survey your employees immediately after they complete open enrollment while the experience is still fresh in their mind. Add the link to a post-enrollment email. Did you miss the opportunity to do that this year? Don’t worry! Send out the survey as soon as you can put something together. Collecting this group’s data is what matters most, regardless of timing.
Why should you survey?
Employee feedback is the most important data you can obtain to help shape future open enrollments. Their feedback can help you identify any gaps between what you as the employer think is important, and what employees are actually looking for. Furthermore, data obtained from this group can be used to help strengthen your overall communication strategies and enrollment campaigns to raise awareness and provide benefits education to employees who need it.
How should you survey?
Thankfully, there are many free tools online that make it easy to write, create and deploy an open enrollment survey on your own; however, depending on the benefits administration solutions provider you work with, they may be able to execute this survey on your behalf and provide experienced guidance to help you ask the right questions, of the right employees, at the right time.
Here are the top five post open enrollment survey questions we find to be most helpful for actionable next steps and overall analysis:
Pro Tip: Use a Likert scale format (Excellent, Good, Neutral, Fair, Poor) to measure employee experience in a data consistent format.
Pro Tip: Use a Likert scale format (Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied, Extremely dissatisfied) to measure opinion in a data consistent format.
Pro Tip: Use Yes/No check boxes. If the employee selects “No”, add a progressive survey question that asks, “Did you know who to contact for help/guidance during the process?” to gain further insights.
Tip: Use Yes/No check boxes to help you draw general conclusions.
Next Steps: Provide employees with the smoothest, easiest benefits experience when you implement a benefits technology with effortless customization available.
Tip: Make this a required, open-ended question to allow employees the space to share their thoughts and provide ideas you might not have thought of before.
Next Steps: After you gather the data, categorize the responses to this question into similar topics for easier analysis. Take the results a step further and host in-person focus groups to expand on important themes that surfaced from the survey.
The information in this blog post is for educational purposes only. It is not investment, legal or tax advice. For legal or tax advice, you should consult your own counsel. To stay up to date on benefits trends and insights, subscribe to our blog.
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