As a health insurance broker, your job is to help your clients make wise benefits decisions, and they count on you to provide the insights and best practices needed to implement successful employee benefits programs at scale.
The virtual workplace has arrived. The days of benefits fairs, on-site enrollment meetings, on-site vendor support, and roadshows are behind us, and the decisions you make about your benefits administration and communication system during this transition will have consequences for years to come.
The world has gone remote. We are all making adjustments to keep our heads above water, but your charge as a benefits professional hasn’t changed. Open enrollment is coming and you still need to communicate benefits to your workforce to ensure employees understand and value their benefits.
Millions of people must choose a health insurance plan each year. From seniors enrolling in Medicare to the large share of the U.S. population who choose an employer provided offering or selecting among plans on a state exchange, the one constant across all of these settings is that picking the right health insurance plan is extremely difficult.
Studies show that most of your employees would save a significant amount of money by enrolling in a consumer driven health plan (CDHP). However, the majority of them will avoid this option at your next open enrollment because they’re unfamiliar with how CDHPs work and fear experiencing an economic loss. Their cognitive biases will ultimately cause them to miss out on more affordable (but still high-quality) health care and make your job of promoting these plans much harder. So, how do you get employees to move past these often irrational hurdles and consider electing what can be a financial win for both them and your company?
If you haven't already heard the term “employee benefits decision support,” chances are you will soon. In fact, a study by Willis Towers Watson estimates that 71% of employers will offer a decision support tool by 2020. This fast-evolving benefits trend has emerged due to three key reasons:
Your employees make countless decisions every day on the job. And, as part of the human condition, their psychological makeup underscores everything that they do. So, it should come as no surprise that it has an impact on how they handle making choices during open enrollment. Unfortunately, there are a handful of cognitive biases that cause employees to end up with suboptimal health plans for their circumstances. Fortunately, we’re going to identify them, discuss them, and provide suggestions for how you can help employees work through them.
