In the U.S., most full-time employees, whether in private industry or those supporting state and local government, have access to medical care benefits through their job. This makes sense because a comprehensive benefits program that is well-designed, well-communicated and well-understood by employees provides a significant payback in terms of engagement. And, it aids with both retention and recruitment, increasingly important considerations given the current level of unemployment and the ongoing war for talent.
When strong recruitment and retention, along with high levels of engagement, are goals of your benefits offerings, creating and delivering a program that best meets the needs of your workforce is vital.
One place to look for important insights is your annual enrollment (AE) data. During annual enrollment, we collect a myriad of information about our workforce, who they are and the choices they make, and this information can be vital for strategic decision making. Understanding the aggregate data can contribute to effective plan design, efficient administration and successful communications.
You should be able to access this information easily — either directly through your benefits administration system or by request from your administrative provider. If you outsource, a robust reporting dashboard that enables you to self-serve is the most direct route to the information you need.
But, what should you focus on? Looking at data in the categories of who, what and how helps you draw some conclusions about why.
1. Who’s in your workforce?
The first data points to review are your demographics to get a solid sense of how your workforce is composed. Access aggregate data about your population’s gender, age, earnings, marital status and covered dependents. This information serves as a benchmark for the structure of your workforce from a benefits perspective and helps you think critically about your offerings and how they align with the composition of your employee population.
2. What choices did they make?
Migration data tells us what benefit options employees elected. If you had any goals around plan selection — for example, you wanted to increase participation in an HSA plan by a certain percent — here’s where you can see results or shortfalls. It’s helpful to have a snapshot of the choice array before annual enrollment and the selections made after it’s closed for comparison.
While population-level data is helpful, drilling further into the results can provide additional insights. For example, if you have both a PPO and an HSA plan, further segregating data can give you a better idea of which plan appeals to which types of employee. Does the HSA appeal to younger employees? Does the PPO appeal to lower earners?
The more granular data is particularly helpful when analyzing the impact of voluntary offerings. Because generally, only a subset of the workforce opts for these additional benefits, it’s important to understand who your adopters are. If only single men under 30 are enrolling in accident insurance, you can deduce that it’s an attractive offering for that sub-population. If you want to increase enrollment, your challenge becomes demonstrating the value of the benefit to other demographics within your workforce.
Once you understand who is electing what benefits, you can plan for any education or communications you want to introduce. This is where having the demographic data points can help you get more meaningful insights from your population’s choice-making information and enables you to target communications to specific types of recipients.
3. How did they make their decisions?
Understanding how your population interacts with your benefits administration solution can help you in several ways. One potentially alarming piece of data that we’ve derived from our platform is that, on average, people spend just 17 minutes online reviewing their choices and making their benefit decisions. Use this as a benchmark to see how much time your workforce spends on benefits decision making.
A subset of how long employees were online is where they spent their time. In addition to making their elections, did they review resources like an online benefits guide or a video? Review statistics for your website that show which pages were visited most, including utilization statistics for any online decision support tool you offer. This helps you determine what content employees found most useful. How employees accessed your benefits solution is another key data set. You’ll want to know how many people contacted the call center, if available, and what types of questions they asked. Find out the relative enrollment engagement for the website, mobile and call center. If phone contacts are disproportionate, review communications materials to see whether you are inadvertently messaging that the call center is the primary point of contact and adjust verbiage for next year’s AE. If most people are accessing the website through a smartphone, it’s critical that your content and tools are mobile-ready.
The last part of the equation is to begin to draw conclusions about the why, based on what you saw in the overall data. This is where you take off your HR and benefits hats and try to think like an anthropologist — or a behavioral economist. The reality is that employees often don’t behave as we expect, and sometimes they don’t even act in their own self-interest. They forfeit dollars from their FSAs, they lose out on seed money in an HSA, they over-insure themselves. Analyzing the data can help you determine if the cause is lack of understanding or engagement, poor choice architecture or something else. What may seem like irrational decisions to us as HR pros may, in fact, be completely rational based on individual employees’ financial situation and risk tolerance.
If you look critically at the information that’s readily available to you after annual enrollment, you can begin to construct a meaningful, year-over-year view of how your employee population interacts with your benefits program. Having this insight can help you create appropriate goals for ongoing education, administration and plan design to better ensure your benefits align with organizational goals and the needs of your employees.
