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Each year, benefits enrollment presents HR leaders with the challenge of maintaining or improving employee offerings while balancing budget constraints.
The three questions people leaders should be asking themselves during every enrollment cycle are: How do our benefits align with the needs of our workforce? How has it changed from previous years? How can we improve?
Beyond traditional compensation, benefits are a crucial lever for staying competitive and retaining top talent. Open enrollment is an underutilized moment for leaders to connect with the organization, understand what is most valuable to team members, and, from there, build a benefits strategy that reflects those values.
What is your utilization data really telling you?
Before committing to a renewal of your current benefits program, benefit leaders need to dive into the data to really understand engagement and utilization for all programs, ideally segmented by employee population.
Start by requesting year-over-year enrollment and utilization reports from your benefits platforms or broker. This analysis provides a clear picture of how participation and costs have changed over the past year, helps identify trends, and measures the impact of plan changes made in the previous renewal cycle, uncovering opportunities to improve program performance in the year ahead.
At the same time, it's important to remember that data alone doesn't tell the whole story.
Low utilization doesn't necessarily mean a benefit lacks value or should be on the cutting block. Complex user interfaces, high 401(k) fees, and lack of awareness or confusion about the offering are common reasons team members aren’t engaging with offerings, but it doesn’t mean that team members don’t want the benefit.
A 2025 benchmarking study shows that 401(k) enrollment, on average, achieves 87% when coupled with automatic enrollment and simpler plan design. It might be time to move to a new provider or platform, rather than cutting a program entirely, or simply to look into ways to communicate the benefits more clearly. These changes alone can drive an increase in enrollment and engagement.
With employer healthcare costs expected to exceed a historic rate of $18,500 per employee in 2026, HR and finance leaders are faced with a difficult decision to shift programs or pull back on company contributions in order to keep costs affordable.
Utilization data tells leadership what is happening at the team engagement level, but without taking the extra step to understand the ‘why’ behind the numbers, leaders are doing a disservice to their teams and potentially missing out on low-cost solutions to improve engagement.
Benefits decisions require team input
It’s easy to make assumptions about what your team may value based on prior years, but every year the team changes, people grow, and their values and preferences change.
After you run an initial utilization analysis, it’s important to reach out to your team to understand the benefits they believe will be most beneficial to them and how they’re engaging with your current offerings.
At Moxie, we sent out a survey to our team to help select the right health plan mix for our upcoming enrollment year. We were surprised to learn that 74% of team members would be willing to pay a higher premium in exchange for predictable copays.
After you run an initial utilization analysis, it’s important to reach out to your team to understand the benefits they believe will be most beneficial to them and how they’re engaging with your current offerings
We also learned, after connecting with our team, that while people engage with our 401(k) offering, they would contribute more each paycheck if our plan offered lower fees. The solutions to these opportunities are not costly or complex; they simply require asking the right questions and creating opportunities for employees to provide feedback.
Survey design and/or roundtable session prep is a critical part of this process. The goal isn’t to reinforce data using boilerplate questions. Rather, it’s to drill down into the story behind the numbers.
Questions like “Are you currently enrolled in all benefits available to you? If not, why?” and “Are there benefits you wish we offered but don’t?” and “Would you be willing to pay a higher premium for x instead of y?” help to get to the root of where gaps live within your enrollment and engagement.
Armed with real team insights and utilization data, your benefits team and broker can revisit the suite of offerings from a new perspective and ensure their programs are aligned with what employees truly value.
Simplify benefits to maximize engagement
HR leaders live in the benefits system ecosystem day in and day out, interchangeably using language that sounds foreign to team members.
Can you confidently say that everyone in your organization knows how to locate 401(k) expense ratios? Do they know the difference between an HSA and an FSA? Can they discern a PPO from an HMO? Benefit literacy is an important part of increasing team engagement, and this is an opportunity where you can lean on your brokers and partners to improve team benefit knowledge.
Turning workforce data into early warnings for high-cost employees
Utilizing AI, it’s now possible to easily create in-depth benefit guides in multiple modalities (one-pagers, web pages, podcasts, LLM knowledge bases) so that your team can access and understand what your company offers in a format that is most suitable to them.
Enrollment is a great time to connect with your broker and other benefit partners to create and host information sessions directly with your team to break down the confusing and complicated barriers that stand between your team and actually utilizing the offerings.
It’s not enough to pull together an annual benefits training on ‘what we offer and what’s new this year.’ HR professionals should use this as a moment to break down the complexity behind each offering and create training sessions unique to each audience.
Benefits utilization at Moxie
At Moxie, we partnered with our broker to host an in-depth team-wide training with a 100% attendance rate on our entire benefits offering this year, resulting in increased enrollment for all of our offerings across the board.
Too often, open enrollment materials assume employees already understand the fundamentals of benefits terminology and plan design.
In reality, many employees are navigating concepts such as deductibles, coinsurance, HSAs, and retirement plans without the knowledge needed to make confident decisions. Rather than placing the burden on employees to figure it out on their own, employers should invest in educational moments that help guide their employees in a way they can understand.
Too often, open enrollment materials assume employees already understand the fundamentals of benefits terminology and plan design
For example, while many employees may understand that a Health Savings Account can help cover medical expenses, fewer recognize its potential as a long-term investment vehicle with significant tax advantages. These are the kinds of connections that benefits and HR leaders can help employees make during enrollment sessions.
By providing context, education, and personalized guidance, organizations can empower employees to make choices that better support their financial and physical well-being while increasing the value employees derive from the benefits being offered.
Open enrollment is an untapped opportunity to connect with your team, showcase the full value of your benefits, and demonstrate that your company is really listening to the needs of your organization.
When you take the time to understand why people are engaging (or not), it turns the renewal ‘to-do’ task into a strategic people conversation.
Kate Connor is the Chief Operating Officer of Moxie Communications Group, where she leads operations, AI, finance, people operations, and strategy across the agency.
