Most companies have an annual enrollment period. This is an important window of time during which employees can make adjustments to their benefits package for the upcoming year. Important as this period is, and valuable as it can be, many times employees have trouble staying engaged in the annual benefits presentations. This is useful information that you don’t want them to miss. How can you make these presentations more engaging and fun for your employees?

Here are 5 ways you can make your employee benefit presentations fun:

1. Make them interactive.

• Give your employees interactive handouts to follow along with the presentation. Leave plenty of time for questions at the end of the presentation. On that note, don’t just read your PowerPoint word for word. Take good notes ahead of time and speak freely during the presentation, injecting emphasis and excitement into your voice. Make eye contact with the audience, utilize good body language and don’t stand in one spot for the entirety of the presentation. Some companies even incorporate giveaways or special incentives into their enrollment week to promote employee participation.

2. Make them visually stimulating. 

• It’s no surprise that most benefits presentations are very data driven. This can lead to word heavy slides and graphs that all start to look the same after a while. You don’t want your employees to start snoozing during your presentation. Utilize high quality picture and even video clips during your presentation. Try to limit the use of graphs, pie charts and flowcharts. These will only bore and maybe even confuse your employees if too much is thrown at them at once. This leads me to my next suggestion.

3. Make them concise.

• There are plenty of ways you can make sure your employee benefit presentations are kept concise. People have a limited amount of time available in their workday, so you want to respect their time as much as you want them to stay engaged in your presentations.  Some companies offer “Lunch and Learn” events where employees get to have lunch while learning about their benefit offerings. These type of events are successful because they add in a social element in addition to the professional one.
   
  Another option is to record videos about employee benefit options that can be easily accessible at anytime from anywhere. Record short, lighthearted and educational videos for on-demand viewing using your company intranet or YouTube channel. By keeping them short, you can also keep your employees’ attention. Make them informative and fun.

4. Make them a team effort.

• No matter how good of a public speaker you are, there is power in numbers. Choose a co-presenter for your benefit enrollment presentations. This will make it more interesting, and if the two of you plan ahead you can have some fun with the presentation. Try to incorporate some humor into your presentation. Not only will it lighten the mood, it will help your audience to stay interested. The humor must be relevant to what you are discussing, not entirely off-topic. You can share a favorite story from your personal work experience that would relate to the topic and that your audience would enjoy or could learn from. Is there no one at your company to co-present with? Another idea is to bring a special speaker from one of your vendors who can offer more specialized insight.

5. Make them virtual. 

• In this day and age, more and more companies have employees who work remotely. So, how do you ensure that they receive the benefit enrollment information they need? Make your presentations virtual. Engage with employees on social media to keep them informed about upcoming presentations or when a recent seminar has been made available online. Sponsor webinars that convey the benefit enrollment information they need to know. Have some of the webinars in the evening, so you’re your employees’ spouses also have the option to be included.
   
  Another idea is to have a virtual benefits fair. Senior Business Manager at PGi, Karrie Andes, created a virtual benefits fair for her employees. She created iMeet rooms where vendors were present to answer employee questions. Links for each vendor room were sent out to the workforce with a schedule. This gave employees the ability to communicate with the vendors they wanted to at a time that was convenient for both of them.

BONUS: Best Videos to Use for Your Open Enrollment presentation

 
Below, I have compiled some vides from other companies to give you some ideas of what type of videos you could make for your own OE planning.

#1 – The Teaser

• Let your employees know open enrollment is coming with a teaser video like this one from Guide Spark.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6MSYQy2Ex4
  This video does a clever job of demonstrating a couple important things employees need to consider during OE:
  • You have changed in the past year
  • You should anticipate any changes that will be occurring in your life during the upcoming year and enroll in your benefits accordingly

#2 – Explanation of Open Enrollment

• Especially for new employees, create a video that simply explains what open enrollment is. It should cover what open enrollment is, that it only comes once a year, and that some benefit options and costs may have changed since last year.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoiCqYp7cd4

#3 – Important Dates

• Some companies have more than one open enrollment period per year. In these situations, in particular, it is useful to have a video showcasing the important enrollment dates employees need to be aware of. This video from HealthTN clearly tells the three essential dates of enrollment: when it starts, when is the last day to enroll, and when the new coverage begins.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCM7gOps5Gs 

#4 – How to Enroll

• Once it’s time to enroll, you need to provide your employees with instructions on how to do it and where to find the necessary information. I found this video from the University of Colorado to be very helpful.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZhowALxyA4

Not only does the video tell employees how to enroll, it visually walks them through the process, directing them to the enrollment site and pointing out anything that could potentially confuse them in their decision-making.

These videos are just a starting point of what you could create for your own company. You will need to have videos that are custom-made for your company, whether they be generated in-house or from an outside hire. As technology becomes more accessible, the costs of incorporating custom videos for this type of venture goes down, sometimes as low as $4,000 per video. Getting videos made for your OE period may be more work upfront, but after that the process can be pretty self-sustaining. Another note worth mentioning, is that it saves time, which helps to free up your employees to be more productively working on other projects. According to a Brandon-Hall study, e-learning takes up to 60 percent less employee time than a traditional classroom setting.

Think of what you and your employees could accomplish with that extra time and start strategizing how to make your own company open enrollment videos.

While open enrollment may not inherently be the most thrilling topic, it is an important one. Your benefit presentations have the potential to be interesting and engaging to your employees, and if you put some of these tips into practice, you may be surprised to find that they can even be fun!

References

• 3 Ways To Spice Up Employee Benefits Annual Open Enrollment Meetings -- https://www.griffinbenefits.com/employeebenefitsblog/3-ways-to-spice-up-employee-benefits-annual-open-enrollment-meetings
• 7 Ways to Make Your Employee Benefit Presentations Fun -- https://www.thebalance.com/fun-employee-benefit-presentations-1177782
• Fun Presentation Ideas for HR Benefits Enrollment and Benefits Rollout -- https://www.pgi.com/resources/articles/fun-presentation-ideas-hr-benefits-enrollment-and-benefits-rollout/
• How to present benefits orientation to employees that doesn’t put them to sleep -- https://www.pgi.com/resources/articles/how-to-present-benefits-orientation-to-employees-that-doesnt-put-them-to-sleep/