Tip of the Day: Get to your 'fighting weight'

Employers are fighting the downward economy and upward health care costs by changing weight classes, so to speak. Instead of heavyweight, high-cost HMOs and PPOs, companies are slimming down to become middleweights, shifting costs to employees through consumer-driven plans, changing insurance carriers and/or bridging gaps in core offerings with mini-med and voluntary benefits.

Although employers months ago began trimming their bottom lines, making changes to salary, hiring, training and benefits budgets, as open enrollment season fast approaches, benefit managers must educate employees about how those changes will affect their benefits options for next year.

In the opener to EBN's three-part Open Enrollment Boot Camp series, Associate Editor Kathleen Koster gets open enrollment tips from communication experts, who generally recommend revisiting open enrollment offerings and policies six to nine months beforehand to ensure enough time to effectively communicate with employees.

Overheard At: How Piggly Wiggly got high-tech

In today's special Web-exclusive podcast, grocery chain Piggly Wiggly discusses how they moved from paper to online enrollment systems. Craig Massey, director of HR, shares the story with EBA Managing Editor McLean Robbins.

Tip of the Day: Five questions to tell your employees to ask at open enrollment

When brainstorming ways to better educate your employees about the decisions they need to make at open enrollment, it's often imperative that benefits professionals put themselves in an employee's shoes.

Andy Smith, Senior Partner with Cornerstone Financial Partners, believes that by not investing the time to make informed choices, workers may be leaving money on the table and putting their future at risk.

Take Smith's five questions and ask yourself one more: Am I educating my workers to make a proper decision about this topic?

1. Is the 401(k) account properly allocated? "For most workers, the 401(k) will be the primary source of income in retirement, so it's important for investors to review their portfolio and rebalance when necessary," says Smith.

According to the Financial Engines National 401(k) Evaluation, 69% of the nearly 1 million 401(k) participants surveyed have portfolios with inappropriate risk and/or diversification. Additionally, 36% hold high concentrations of company stock, and 33% fail to contribute enough to receive the full company match, leaving money on the table.

2. How much is in company stock?

The Pension Protection Act of 2006 has made it easier for employees to diversify out of company stock. The act gives employees the right to sell publicly traded company stock received as a matching contribution in a retirement plan account after three years of service for original matching contributions, and immediately for employee contributions.

3. Is there a better choice for health insurance?
Spend time educating employees about CDHPs and HDHPs in such a way as to inform them of which choice will most benefit them health-wise and financially.

For 2009, the maximum annual HSA contribution for an eligible individual with self-only coverage is $3,000. For family coverage, the maximum annual HSA contribution for 2009 is $5,950. Individuals age 55 and older can also make an additional "catch-up" contribution of $1,000 in 2009.

4. Are Flexible Spending Accounts being fully utilized? In addition to visits to the doctor, the cost of eyeglasses, dental work, psychologist visits, even cough syrup can be run through the plan.

Some companies also offer a dependent care Flexible Spending Account (FSA) which allows contributions up to $5,000 a year.

5. Is long-term care coverage necessary? According to the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance roughly one-third of men and one-half of women age 65 and over will require some form of long-term care.

Smith advises married couples to review both spouses' benefits to find any gaps or overlaps in coverage. "It's possible to save money or improve coverage simply by moving the family to a spouse's heath plan," says Smith.

News You Can Use: Small businesses crave open enrollment advice

What do small businesses plan to do during open enrollment this year? Our new Web-only piece from SMB-HR gives you the scoop.

News You Can Use: Guardian partners with Mia Hamm to make benefits cool

In a push to make benefits more relevant to today's employees, Guardian Life has commissioned soccer star Mia Hamm to promote benefits enrollment to employees. She's got a cool video, sure, but does this technique work?

Read a full post on the subject from EBA Editor Robert Whiddon.

Watch and weigh in below with your comments.

Employees deserve needs-based selling, too

During a recent online discussion of strategies for successful worksite enrollments, it became clear that a broker/adviser will frequently conduct a needs-based sale with the company's C-suite or other benefits decisionmakers but not with individual workers.

Once the venue shifts to the worksite and individual enrollments, the focus switches to product attributes. The consensus coming out of our online discussion was that individual employees need the needs-based pitch as well. Talking product intricacies when the worker doesn't understand the big picture benefits of a critical illness program or other type of voluntary benefit is a recipe for poor participation, according to our experts.

Check out the archive of our recent discussion and let us know your thoughts in the comments section. Do your employees get a detailed explanation of how the benefits offered at the worksite meet their needs? Or, is the presentation more focused on coverage limits and other product attributes?

News You Can Use: Open Enrollment Trends

We know that one of two things are probably on your mind at all times (three, if you live in DC like we do) .... open enrollment, the economy and the election.

But since you're likely too busy to see the forest for the trees, we're continually blogging during your busiest times, bringing you short news bites to be easily digested on coffee breaks.

Today, check out what Watson Wyatt predicts will be the hottest trends in Open Enrollment for 2009:

• Increased emphasis on improving personal health.
• Value-based prescription drug benefits and a shift to co-insurance.
• Greater access to onsite clinics, retail clinics and health coaches.
• Health savings accounts linked to high-deductible health plans.
• Full coverage or low copayments for preventive screenings and tests.
• Greater use of new media to communicate benefit information.
• Spousal surcharges.

Don't miss our NOVEMBER feature on improving your benefit communication know-how.

Tip of the Day: Supercharge your benefit communications during OE

You're likely in the throes of open enrollment, but that doesn't mean that last-minute improvements can't be made, particularly in the area of benefit communication.

Jennifer Benz, founder of Benz Communications, offers these five simple tips:

• Keep it simple. If you haven’t already done so, create a one-page Enrollment “Tip Sheet” that lists what’s changing in as simple a form as possible (perhaps just a bulleted list), gives brief enrollment instructions, and tells employees and families where to go for all the details.
• Make it personal. Resist the temptation to include figures about your total benefits spend or tell employees how many billion dollars per year bad health care decisions are costing the US. If you talk about your overall health care costs, break it down into what the company spends per employee.
• Promote missed or under-utilized benefits. Put together a list of the five to 10 benefit plans employees aren't using enough -- health savings account, fitness benefits, voluntary insurance, hidden features of the EAP, preventive care benefits, commuter benefits, etc. -- as a one-page flyer.
• Talk to your employees and let your employees talk. Debating whether or not to schedule enrollment meetings? In-person meetings are always worth the effort. Employees will appreciate being reached out to and given an opportunity to ask questions. Can’t make it to all of your locations? Hold virtual meetings or conference calls. Post the recording online for employees who can’t make it.
• Or, start a benefits blog and ask employees to give feedback and ask questions via the comments section. You don’t have to be prolific, just a post a week during enrollment season will be of huge value to employees.
• Get managers in the game.
  Chances are your employees are talking to their managers at least once a week, maybe several times a day. Get “the boss” in the game and give managers the tools and incentive to talk to their employees about benefits. Make sure your managers know benefits are an essential part of motivating their team. Often they just don’t know what to say or how to say it, so give your managers talking points and a quick run-down on why it matters.

Scone: Trust issues limit employees’ HR interactions to transactional

Two surveys out this week show HR/benefits managers have some PR work to do among employees at their companies.

First, the Opinion Research Corporation finds Americans are more likely to go to a friend or colleague than HR about an issue at work. Most (66%) would, understandably, speak to their manager about a problem. But the stats become cringe-worthy when you consider that 39% prefer to turn to friends and less than one-quarter (22%) would go to their HR department for help.

Worse, 26% of workers surveyed doubt HR’s commitment to keep details confidential. Where did employees get the idea that HR/benefits pros are a bunch of blabbermouths? Perhaps somewhere in your efforts to become a strategic business partner and aligning the benefits function with corporate interests, employees began to believe that your job was to help the company, not them. Just my two cents.

Whatever the reasons behind the distrust, for now at least, it seems employees would prefer to keep the HR-employee relationship a transactional one. And even in this regard, it looks like benefits pros have some work to do. Although MetLife reports that HR is the number one source consulted for advice during open enrollment, 51% of employees say they didn’t get the resources they needed to make informed benefits elections.

Many employees said they felt either confused (25%) or frustrated (24%) while selecting their benefits, leading three-quarters of employees to make no changes – surprising, given that 44% experienced a major life event, such as a divorce, having a baby, buying a home or getting married.

MetLife offers several tips for employers on improving benefits communication and guidance, and a new tool to simplify the enrollment process. However, in my view, employers can improve employees’ understanding and perceived value of your company’s benefits and the HR/benefits function without spending anything. Just talk to your workers. That’s it. Face-to-face, and answer their questions individually. Why this idea has become a novel one, I’ll never know.

I know that you’re busy, and self-service tools make your job easier. And I know you’ve read surveys that show employees want more benefits information available to them online. But when it comes to confusing financial decisions, people want to talk to another human being. It’s why in a world that’s almost completely automated, people will call a customer service line and press countless buttons just to get to a live voice.

Yet strangely, MetLife finds only 30% of employers conduct enrollment meetings/seminars. If you want employees to be responsible stewards of their health care and other benefits dollars and decisions, you have to show them how. In person.

For employers to be successful, both the trust and education issues must be addressed. As Wheatley says, “The critical role HR plays within an organization should not be underestimated, as the success of any enterprise depends significantly on the extent to which its workforce is engaged with and dedicated to its mission.”