For oh so many reasons, this is my favorite time of year! It’s not just because we’re on countdown to Turkey Day with all forty plus members of the family crowded into my cousin’s basement with fourteen pies to divide. Fall is wonderful and vibrant. The air is crisp, the leaves represent the full range of the Crayola universe, comfort food and tailgating await every weekend. I went running through our neighborhood last weekend and was mesmerized by the trees, whose entire canopy of leaves were the smoldering coals of a campfire brilliant against the black of the bark.

But then I remember that there are those among us who look to the end of October and the beginning of November with dread each year. You couldn’t tell just by looking at them – they appear normal (at most, a little sleep deprived or caffeine jittery). We’re not talking about football haters or pumpkin-phobics, they are the HR Practitioners responsible for standing up their company’s Annual Enrollment event.

For those of you outside of benefits or HRIS, I cannot describe to you the ultimate visibility and absolute career damaging potential of this once a year event. Not only do we have employees making their most significant financial decision of the year (unless they’ve bought a house or a car, this is not hyperbole – this stuff matters!) but it’s often the one event a year where all employees are hitting one website where salary, HR and organizational data must all co-exist peacefully! It’s amazing we ever left behind the world of paper forms.

If it’s any consolation to those answering enrollment and eligibility questions right now, just remember we could be back in the days of IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Do you remember how difficult it was to use the keypad buttons to spell out your beneficiary’s full name? Kaiser was never too bad, but it would suck if there were too many letters or Qs, Zs or (gasp) hyphens!

For those of you in the midst of OE Hell, here are three items to keep in mind:

1)      Targeted Reporting & Proactive Calls

The best systems will provide you with an ad-hoc reporting engine that will let you filter out those employees likely to get caught in a post-enrollment issue such as a HDHP (High Deductible Health Plan) election without taking the company HSA (Health Savings Account.) It could happen – but with a little bit of predictive worrying you can diffuse a later crisis by a quick call to confirm they fully understand what they’ve elected. This is also an amazing tool if it can show you those who have yet to enroll so you can send extra “nasty-grams” their way.

2)      Financial Planning

The Benefits season is such a great time to introduce the idea of financial or retirement planning. So much of our consumer society is focused on immediate consumption; we don’t want to miss an opportunity to engage our co-workers on some long-term thinking. Some Benefits Administration/HRIS systems can insert “extra benefit screens” into the election process to highlight company provided benefits or other messaging an employer wants to share with their employees. This is a great opportunity to alert employees to EAP, Financial Planning (401(k), Dave Ramsey, etc.) and other resources they may have forgotten about.

3)      Encourage Early Elections

Our benefit consultants are often asked how long an enrollment period should last. What’s funny is that our vendors tell us it doesn’t really matter since everyone’s going to enroll on the last day anyway! There are some great charts out there showing the huge spikes in traffic that occur on the last day (or sometimes the day after) an announced enrollment window. If you know this to be your company’s pattern, there is certainly value in seeing if you can encourage early enrollment through HR communication within your company. I’ve seen a campaign that highlights the “elect early and you can come back and change it if you want” or prize drawings taken from early entries. (Just think how much your IT organization will love you if you can spread out the traffic over the full two-week enrollment window!)

Do you have any Open Enrollment tips or wisdom to share? How about a horrifying story from running Annual Enrollments before the online systems we rely on so much? We’d love to hear. Please use the comment field below to share with us your stories or ask any questions we can research for you. We are here for your HR Tech needs – including therapy – so holler out and let’s get some great discussions going.