Open enrollment is fast approaching for the majority of businesses and it’s time to start thinking about your employee benefits. As an employer, you will be looking at your cost expectations and managing the costs against budgets while trying to maintain programs that offer great coverage and reasonable cost share for the employees. For the employees, it’s time to assess what they currently have and to determine if it meets their needs.
During this period, employees will review the coverages that they have predominately with the medical, dental, vision, retirement, and life plans considering any life changes that might have impacted their benefits.
Key steps in the process for the benefit renewal process are the following:
- Review current offerings including coverage, costs, and utilization.
- Determine what the needs of the employees are currently.
- Review with your broker other options or coverages that might be available that aren’t cost-prohibitive and offer value to the employees.
- Over-communicate. You can’t provide too much information.
- Start your process early and allow enough time for employees to make educated decisions.
Open enrollment is a valuable opportunity to tailor individual benefits to individual needs and the opportunity to add value to every participating employee value to the total compensation package.