PEO
Open enrollment works better as a year-round conversation than a one-time campaign
By Insurance Wire Staff, . Insurance Wire.
Open enrollment, the annual window when employees pick their health, dental and other workplace benefits, tends to be treated as a short campaign: send a few emails, hold a webinar, close the window. Employee Benefit News reports that benefits leaders are pushing back on that model.
What the argument is
"A handful of reminder emails isn't enough for decisions that can have a real impact on someone's health, finances and family," Pratt said. "The best benefit experiences start before enrollment opens and continue long after it closes, giving employees ongoing opportunities to learn, ask questions, and revisit their choices as life changes."
The practical implication is that communication should be treated as an ongoing process rather than a seasonal push. Employees who understand their options before the window opens are better positioned to make choices that hold up through the year. Those who receive support after enrollment closes are more likely to actually use what they selected.
Why this matters for employers and PEOs
For professional employer organizations (PEOs), companies that manage HR, payroll and benefits on behalf of smaller businesses, this framing has direct operational weight. PEOs often administer open enrollment across dozens or hundreds of client companies at once. If the communication model is a burst of activity followed by silence, the downstream effect shows up in employee confusion, underused benefits and avoidable mid-year changes.
The piece does not quantify how much better outcomes improve with year-round communication, and no study is cited to establish a causal link between communication frequency and enrollment quality. What it offers is a practitioner's view, not a measured result.
What to watch
The broader question for any employer or PEO running enrollment is where the gaps actually sit: before the window, during it, or in the months after. Pratt's framing suggests all three matter, but the report does not specify which stage produces the most friction in practice. That is the diagnostic work that falls to whoever owns the benefits function.
Medical care prices rose 1.5 percent in the year through September 2026, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, a slower pace than overall consumer inflation at 3.7 percent over the same period. That gap matters here because employees choosing between plan tiers are often weighing premium costs against expected out-of-pocket spending, and a year of stable medical inflation does not necessarily mean stable premiums. Better communication before enrollment opens gives employees a clearer picture of what they are actually comparing.
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