Promoting Well-being During Open Enrollment

For many organizations, the open enrollment season can be quite a stressful time. The competing priorities of many key benefits make it challenging to accomplish much for your well-being program.

This season presents one of the best opportunities you have to communicate well-being. Unfortunately, it is often wasted.

Well-being typically falls into a 30-page open enrollment guide that is comprised of dozens of benefits an employee has access to. But, when well-being is seen as just “another benefit”, it can never be seen as a key part of your culture.

At Propel, we advocate heavily for making well-being a part of your culture. We wrote this eBook on the subject that we highly recommend you read. After more than two decades helping organizations build high-performing well-being programs, we know that making well-being a part of your culture increases your program engagement far more than leaving it as an external resource.

So, how do you spread real awareness for your well-being program during a time where your entire benefits catalog demands equal attention?

How do you distinguish it as more than just a benefit when you have a very rigid framework in which you must work?

Here are three ways to make open enrollment an accelerator for your well-being program.

Show your program in motion

If you want employees to buy in, they need to see something happening. Great automobile advertisements show a car in motion for the sake of emotion.

Consumers instantly identify with the freedom and possibilities that a moving car symbolizes. You don’t have the same reaction when you see a car parked and stationary.

Similarly, employees don’t have much of an emotional connection to a list of well-being benefits on a page.

Many open enrollment guides will allocate one to two pages to well-being, others less. Instead of simply listing out the various components of your well-being program (our platform, our EAP, our mindfulness app, etc.), consider showcasing your program in action.

How are employees currently interacting with the program? What success has your team heard about? What quotes can you gather from champions or leadership on what the well-being program means to them?

Structure your designated section as a narrative. Use your communication to remind employees of how the program has made an impact over the course of the year, then preview the year ahead.

Showcase the program as an active movement that employees must be a part of.

Make a distinction between well-being as a benefit and a lifestyle

The way you communicate has lasting implications. Word choice will affect employee perception.

If well-being is referred to as “your well-being benefits,” employees will see your program as a collection of benefits. If your goal is to make well-being stand out, it cannot be framed in the same way as your life insurance benefits.

Use open enrollment to make a clear distinction. Instead of speaking of well-being as, “something employees have access to,” present it as how employees are currently living.

What habits can you highlight? Has one of your teams made well-being a consistent part of their day? Can you point to a leader that is exemplifying well-being?

Follow a narrative style and frame well-being as the “way employees are living.”

Within this mix, you can pepper in the benefits and tools that you offer. If you have seen influencers speak about the products they use, you have a good idea of how showing off a particular lifestyle can still move people to action.

Well-being should be describing a lifestyle, not a benefit.

Demonstrate value before how-to

Use 80% of your words to communicate the value of your program to employees, and 20% to provide details on how employees can register/participate.

Many leaders are so concerned about raising awareness for how employees can get involved that they gloss over the reasons for getting involved to share step by step instructions.

While detailed instructions on how to participate are necessary, they become moot if the employee doesn’t find the program interesting because they don’t see the value.

Showcase value, then have a deliberate call to action that follows. There can always be links to pages/documents with the step-by-step instructions. Your job is to communicate the value of the program in the short space you have available. Think of it as the elevator pitch for your program - you must clearly demonstrate why someone ought to participate in a very short time. You will be able to do that by focusing more of your time on the value they will receive.

Don’t sacrifice the opportunity to make open enrollment a podium for your well-being program’s success. These three strategies can turn a historically bland page in your OE guide into one that gives your program serious traction.

Implications for the well-being administrator:

• Open enrollment can be an accelerant for your program if you properly frame well-being as a lifestyle, not as another benefit.

• Tell a story and get feedback from real employees to make your communication appeal emotionally to other employees.

• Spend more time on the value the program brings/has already brought than the instructions for how to participate.

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