5 Steps to Ensure Your Open Enrollment Season Benefits Your Employees

Can you believe open enrollment season 2025 is just around the corner? Yes, it’s that time of year again, when your employees get the chance to evaluate their current benefits, compare plan options, and select the best benefits for them and their families. These benefits may include medical, dental, and vision insurance, flexible spending accounts (FSAs), life and disability insurance, and more.

Open enrollment season also provides you with an important opportunity: to showcase your company’s investment in your people and maximize employee engagement and employer brand awareness along the way.

We’ve compiled a handy checklist to help your HR team prepare for a successful 2025 open enrollment.

5 Steps for Open Enrollment Season Success

1. Review Your Data

The fundamental first step is to review your employees’ feedback about your 2024 benefit plans and last year’s open enrollment process. This feedback may have been gathered via formal and informal mechanisms.

For example, recent employee engagement surveys and exit interviews will provide helpful insights into what’s working and help you identify any shortcomings in your benefits coverage or the effectiveness of your overall open enrollment campaign.

2. Update Your Benefit Offerings

In addition to considering workers’ feedback from last year, it’s also a good idea to look outside your company. Take time to connect with your benefit plan providers and ask them to share data-driven insights into how employees are using their benefits, and which are the most and least popular plan options for different age groups within your organization. This will give you a clear understanding of the following:

• Trends in employee preferences and potential gaps in coverage.
• Whether the plans offered are relevant and valuable to different demographics within your workforce.
• How you might customize your benefits package to better meet your employees’ needs.

Look for creative ways to augment or expand your suite of benefits. For example, financial wellness is as critical to your employees’ overall well-being as physical and mental wellness. A financial wellness program will integrate easily with complementary programs, like health savings accounts (HSAs) and flexible spending accounts (FSAs).

3. Fine-Tune Your Strategy

Once you’ve fine-tuned your benefits offerings, you’re ready to start formalizing how you roll out your open enrollment campaign. Here are key questions and considerations:

• How can I reach all my distinct employee audience segments?
• Who are my key change champions or benefit advocates for this campaign?
• How will we measure the effectiveness of our open enrollment campaign?
• What activities are feasible given the budget we’re working with?

Next, you can start to articulate key employee messaging, such as:

• Why comprehensive health and wellness benefits are important?
• What’s changed since last year (evergreen benefits and programs vs. new or updated options)?
• Key open enrollment milestones and events.

4. Offer Employees Educational Resources

To help your employees make timely and informed decisions about their benefits coverage, be sure to provide them with resources that explain their benefits options. This might include brochures, FAQs, plan comparison tools, and complimentary appointments with benefits advisors who can provide 1-on-1 assistance and advice.

Ideally, you should offer a diverse range of channels where employees can find important information and seek assistance, such as a dedicated email address, phone line, and instant messaging channel.

5. Let Technology Do the Heavy Lifting

Consider leveraging digital software solutions to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your campaign. These tools automate many aspects of open enrollment, reducing the administrative burden on your HR team and minimizing the chance of errors. The best solutions will:

• Provide you with a holistic view of your benefits offerings and allow you to manage and update them easily.
• Empower employees with self-service options so they can review and select benefits in their own time while having access to all necessary information on demand.
• Include tools to help you maintain compliance with ACA and other regulatory requirements.
• Use advanced analytics and reporting tools to deliver valuable insights into enrollment trends and employee preferences.

Let’s Get Ready to (En)roll

Open enrollment is a chance to demonstrate how you value your workers by offering benefits that can make a real difference in their lives. If you’re considering adding employee financial wellness to your benefits package, schedule a call with a Payactiv specialist to learn more about this easy-to-implement benefit option—at no cost to you!

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