As summer begins to wind down, now is the perfect time to start planning for your upcoming employee benefits renewal. Even if your current plan seems to be working well, proactive planning is essential to ensure you're offering the most competitive and cost-effective benefits for your employees.
As experts in benefits optimization, we're here to share our insights and strategies to help you navigate the renewal process successfully.
Top Tips to Optimize Employee Benefits
1. Anticipate Cost Increases and Plan Accordingly
First things first – prepare for increases. Yes, even if your plan is “running well” (basically means if you don’t have a lot of people with expensive claims – certain prescriptions, treatment plans, and emergency room visits contribute to high cost).
Regular, ongoing education is a great way to help make your employees informed and empowered participants in their own benefits (we'll cover more on that later), but from what we’re hearing and seeing, increases are on the horizon.
How do you prepare for increases?
- Review your budget: You look at the budget to get an understanding of what you can absorb to minimize the impact on the employees. If the idea of an increase scares you, imagine what that feels like for your people. The increase will depend on your group size and experience rating, so it’s a good idea to talk to your broker partner to see what their estimates are projecting.
- Gather employee feedback: Survey your team! Find out what benefits people like most and what people are using least, and prioritize the most important benefits based on your team’s feedback.
- Consult with your broker: If you’re on a fully insured plan that is running well, consider moving to a level-funded or self-insured plan during your renewal. These are not as scary as they sound, and a strong broker partner can help walk you through how to plan and budget, what kind of stop-loss insurance you need, and how to administer it.
- Offer multiple plan tiers: Look at your plan tiers (even small groups should try to offer more than one benefit plan if possible; groups over 50 should absolutely be offering 2-3 plan options). Consider adding a high deductible HSA plan as your low option if you aren’t already; providing benefit plan options at multiple affordability levels can lower costs and help employees get the coverage they need.
2. Evaluate Your Benefits Broker
Something else on your radar now, if you’re renewing in December/January, should be evaluating your relationship with your benefits broker. Having a strong, trustworthy broker partner can make a massive difference in the experience your team has with your benefits, as well as your cost savings.
Great brokers will have strong relationships with multiple carriers and will be able to help effectively negotiate for more favorable costs. If you haven’t reviewed your broker partnership in 2-3 years, now is a good time to compare your broker to several others. Great brokers should feel like strategic partners, helping you to evaluate your options, bringing new solutions and ideas to the table, making sure you’re leveraging technology and automation, and suggesting changes that can help enhance your employee experience while managing costs.
It’s also crucial to look at your broker’s commission structure against several others to ensure they’re being paid in line with market rates. We have an extensive network of trusted, tried, and true benefits broker partners if you need any introductions.
3. Empower and Educate Your Employees
Educating your employees about their benefits is crucial for maximizing their value and minimizing costs. Regular, year-round communications can help employees understand their coverage options, make informed decisions, and reduce healthcare expenses.
Key areas to focus on:
- Benefits Basics: Ensure employees understand terms like deductible, out-of-pocket maximum, premium, copay, and coinsurance.
- Healthcare Utilization: Provide guidance on when to use urgent care, emergency rooms, and telehealth services.
- Preventive Care: Encourage employees to take advantage of preventive care services to maintain their health and potentially reduce premiums.
- Cost-Saving Strategies: Share tips on how to search for costs, use telehealth, and optimize prescription coverage.
We’ve created an entire suite of microlearning videos that explain, in regular language, what everything means so that people are making the best choices for themselves (and their families).
Education = smarter plan use = lower experience rating = lower premiums. Everyone wins!
4. Prioritize Employee Wellness
Do you get plan discounts for leveraging certain wellness benefits? Some carriers offer plan discounts if you host on-site flu shot clinics or biometric screenings or leverage other wellness plans, including smoking cessation.
It’s also crucial to make sure your people know about all the perks that come with the insurance – a lot of times, carriers offer cash rewards for getting your annual checkup, flu shot, and blood work; they also tend to offer discounts on fitness and nutrition programs and equipment, so make sure you include these in your regular benefits communications. Money is tight for everyone – help people make the most of what they have while helping to keep your premium increases low.
5. Evaluating Plan Situs for Multi-State Employers
For our multi-state friends, something you may want to consider as you approach your renewal is the state where your plan is sitused. Most plans are sitused in the state where either most of your headcount resides or where your official headquarter office is located (makes sense). However, if your values and strategy are set in a way where you want to ensure medical coverage for certain treatments, procedures, or diagnoses is covered, the state of situs can impact your ability to do that.
As an example, if you wanted to ensure that certain reproductive healthcare options are covered under insurance, and your plan is sitused in one of the ten states that do not allow insurance to cover those medical procedures, you may be stuck. However, certain states actually require insurance to cover those same procedures. If you are multi-state, an option would be to have conversations with your broker now to start making the case to change your state of situs during renewal.
This is not an easy, straightforward path free from downsides. Some carriers may balk more than others, and you’ll need a case stronger than “We want X procedures and medical treatments covered in our plan” in order to sway them. You can’t situs a plan in a state where you have no employees, and you’ll need a physical address in that state to change over, but now is the time to start these discussions with your broker to develop a strategy. It may also increase your costs to move your plan to a different state and add those coverages, along with potential tax implications.
You’ve Got This
This may seem like a lot (and some of you may even be recovering from last open enrollment), but prep now makes enrollment later a breeze! And you have a secret weapon – us! Not to toot our horn, but we are pretty great teammates to have in your corner. Too many deliverables and not enough time? We gotcha! We’re the wizards behind the curtain! We’re the stealth squad helping you win! We’re your hype crew (that does the work). We’ve been there, we’ve done that, and we’ve got you!
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