Benefit Counseling: The Key to Successful Enrollment

This brief article discusses the importance of meeting with employees one-on-one in order to best explain their benefits.

It is important that employees understand their benefits when they are enrolling to ensure they make the best choice for themselves, their families, their lifestyles and their budgets.

Benefit Counseling

A good solution to combat benefit confusion is to provide one-on-one benefit counseling leading up to your open enrollment period. Many HR professionals believe that individual counseling is the most effective enrollment education tool, ahead of group meetings and Web-based counseling. Other research shows that employees are typically not proactive in learning about their benefit plans, and prefer face-to-face meetings for benefits communication.

What about Cost?

Despite recognizing its value, many employers fail to provide a one-on-one benefit meeting for each employee due to cost. However, in most cases this can be achieved at no cost to the employer. If you have a resident HR/benefits expert in your company, that person could facilitate the personal meetings. Otherwise, contact [b_officialname] to discuss other benefits counseling options.

Why One-on-one Counseling?

One-on-one benefit counseling can provide the following benefits for companies:

• Actively engage employees in the benefits enrollment process.
  Educate employees about the benefits they have, including voluntary benefits they think they might not need, or may not understand.
• Help employees make better decisions about choosing benefits that are fitting for their lifestyle, medical health, family and budget.
• Help employees realize what is being spent for their benefits and the value of what is provided.
• Gain better employee appreciation for the benefits offered. This can help with retention initiatives and improve employee morale.
• Achieve a better return on investment for their benefits programs.