Overall open enrollment readiness for employers with 2019 Q1 start dates rose to 48 in August, a full 9 points above where employers stood in July, according to the latest data collected by Employee Benefit Adviser in its monthly Open Enrollment Readiness Benchmark (OERB) survey.

That’s certainly welcoming news, but it is tempered by taking a closer look at the results – and realizing that employers still are not standing where they should be at this point in the employee benefits cycle. Indeed, while overall readiness is improving, the score for open enrollment management came in at just 33 – indicating that many employers are still not ready for the open enrollment periods that will soon commence. To arrive at the scores, the OERB tracks 26 open enrollment activities and asks employers to submit self-assessments of the progress they have made in each.

“What is of significant concern is that there hasn’t been a lot more progress made in terms of the preparation for enrollment and also the communication campaigns designed to actually engage employees and get them to enroll,” said Jack Kwicien, a managing partner at Daymark Advisors, a Baltimore-based consultancy that works with benefit advisers to build their practices.

What’s even more disconcerting is the fact the mid- and large-size employers are even further behind in many areas, compared to their smaller counterparts. For instance, large-sized employers earned a score of 28 and mid-sized employers a score of 20 for enrolling employees, while small employers earned a score of 29. Large and mid-sized employers also trail small employers when it comes to answering employee questions, documenting worker feedback and measuring enrollment engagement metrics.

“Just because your active enrollment doesn’t start until October 15th or November 1st doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be communicating with your employees now about the open enrollment process. Your employees need to hear the message three, four, five times before it finally starts sinking in,” Kwicien warned.

As such, employers should be immersed in initiatives designed to ensure/boost enrollment engagement. With enrollment periods just weeks away, though, the fact that employers with 2019 Q1 start dates scored 32 on boosting enrollment engagement is disconcerting.

Many employers, however, find benefits communications to be a particularly troublesome sticking point when trying to elicit better engagement. In fact, when asked about current challenges, several study participants cited effective communications as an obstacle:

· “Communications to a highly disparate organization are always a challenge. Being limited to space and time to communicate anything in a retail-type setting is always a challenge because the needs of the business always take priority.”
· “Communicating the open enrollment process to our employees and encouraging them to participate in reviewing their benefits and attending our benefit fair.”
· “Communicating to a significantly young workforce with little to no knowledge as it relates to benefits.”

Indeed, communicating the specifics of open enrollment requires a Herculean effort. To better engage employees, human resources professionals should consider passing some of the work to direct supervisors.

“Human resources and benefits cannot be everywhere in an employer enterprise that might have five hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred employees scattered over multiple locations,” Kwicien said. “So, it’s a good idea to deputize supervisors to take care of many of the employee benefits communication tasks. In the absence of dealing directly with someone in human resources, an employee is likely to turn to their immediate supervisor.”

Advisers can also help with the eleventh-hour preparations required to ensure successful open enrollment periods in the coming months.

“The proactive adviser should be quarterbacking the communication that needs to occur in the next 30 days to ensure successful open enrollment. And, then simultaneously, the adviser should be documenting what went right, what went wrong and what the employer needs to do differently in 2019,” Kwicien said.