Making the right choices
SteveWith Annual Benefits Open Enrollment season rapidly approaching in the US, human resources and benefits professionals have started to plan, prepare, and develop their set of materials, communications, and tools to help their employees navigate through what can be a complex and confusing collection of plans, features, costs, and even tax implications.
Absent life changing events like marriage or birth or adoption of a child, open enrollment is the only scheduled opportunity for employees to re-evaluate and potentially change their choice of medical, insurance, and other company sponsored benefit plans. Most organizations prepare some kind of annual open enrollment package, or update the company intranet with information and perhaps even some tools like downloadable worksheets or online calculators to assist employees in the process of evaluating their known and anticipated needs against the available choices to help guide them to make what is hopefully the ‘best’ choice for their circumstances.
But still these resources often are overlooked, can be ignored, or themselves are almost as complex as the plans and options they are trying to explain. Sometimes trying to make sense out of complicated and detailed plan offerings is beyond the capability of traditional methods of communication.
The folks at Jellyvision Lab, the company most well know for the fun and popular series of video-based trivia games called ‘You Don’t Know Jack’, have developed an interesting and really fun, interactive tool to try and make benefits plans more easily understood, and to help employee make more appropriate decisions about their benefits.
Their product, called the Jellyvision Benefits Counselor, is an interactive video tour and guide of your company’s benefit offerings, a configurable resource for information and employee decision support, and a fun and innovative way to help employees learn and make the ‘best decision for their needs.
Check out the video below to learn more about how the Benefits Counselor works:
Behind the interactive video is an administrative process where the company’s benefits staff configures the Counselor with the relevant information about plan design, specific benefits, company policies, etc. (see a portion in the image at right) and a sophisticated process flow for the counselor is developed
based on this design, and employee choices provided as they interact with the Counselor. Standard explanations of the generic tax benefits of Flexible and Health Savings accounts also provide a simple and clear set of guidelines for employees.
For larger organizations that may have a complex set of plans to administer, and lots of employees needing advice, deploying the Jellyvision Benefits Counselor as part of the overall benefits open enrollment communications can lend an element of interactivity, fun, and interest to a process that many employees find difficult and confusing.
What do you think - would an interactive, video game style tool help your staff understand more and make better decisions about their benefits?
Thanks to Harry Gottlieb from Jellyvision for taking some time last week to talk with me about the Jellyvision Benefits Counselor.
Reader Comments (8)
While I enjoyed Jellyvision's clever animation, Steve, I was troubled by two things. Yes, I am a secret benefits wonk:
Lumping FSA and HSA together, when their rules for spending and contributions are very different.
The video (at least) failing to make the most important point about FSA: Use it or lose it. Unlike HSA employee contributions, which roll over every year, FSA money disappears at the end of the plan year unless you've spent it.
Perhaps that warning is elsewhere in the program, and just not on the video sampler, but it's worrisome.
Steve – Great topic. Jellyvision’s tool is part of a bigger overall trend called "personalized guidance". (Full disclosure: I work for Hewitt and am product manager for a similar guidance tool, DecisionDirect.)
In the past, employers would provide people with an avalanche of information about complex plans and then hope they make good decisions. Guidance takes a different path: get employees off to a fast start and help them avoid mistakes by actually suggesting the specific plans they should enroll in based on how they answer questions about their needs and preferences.
Any guidance tool needs to be easy to use (and to find.) It also needs to provide relevant suggestions *quickly* (in passive enrollments any tool offered competes with "doing nothing", so the more time it takes to use the tool, the more people will abandon it). In our five years of designing these tools, we've found that the key lessons are to (1) keep it simple and avoid getting bogged down with detail, (2) don’t try to be everything to everyone, and (3) avoid any perception of the tool having an agenda (for example, if it suggests an HDHP+HSA option no matter how the user answers the questions). If you can achieve these 3 things, you can get people to strongly consider options they may not have considered in the past--which employers like--while helping employees make faster, more confident decisions and helping them avoid costly enrollment mistakes--which everyone likes. Across recent client engagements, we’ve seen migration to CDHP-based plans be 8- to 10-times as high when the employee uses our guidance tool (versus those who don’t use the tool.)
This is a powerful concept. Instead of asking employees to "take time" to digest complex plans and make decisions--and being frustrated when they don't--the guidance concept helps employees make better decisions and avoid mistakes in "whatever time they're willing to give you"--even if it's just a few minutes.
@Bill - thanks for those points. I will make sure the creators of the benefits counselor see your comments, and invite them to respond here with a comment.
@Rob - Thanks for sharing that excellent information. I agree that interactive and less intimidating methods to try and educate the employees are definitely important, and show a concern for the staff as well. I would love to take a look at Decision Direct if you ever have some time.
Hey Bill - With Jellyvision Benefit Counselor, if an employee is looking at an HSA plan, then David, the host, describes the roll-over feature of HSAs. If one is not looking at an HSA plan, but qualifies for an FSA, then we have a whole segment that explains the Use It Or Lose It provision for FSAs. As you know, this feature of FSAs tends to scare people off. And we've specifically designed our experience, to help people understand the savings they're missing out on. After a quick interview, David walks each employee through the math for their own situation, showing estimated tax savings. David demonstrates that even if you don't use all of your FSA contributions in time, you might still break even anyway. And if a company is offering more than a year to spend FSA dollars, David points that out as well. When Jellyvision Benefit Counselor rolled out with employees of Comcast last year, FSA participation increased 30%.
Also: Totally agree with Rob on his three points for personalized guidance, and if I may, I'd add two other criteria as well... (4) Make It Engaging. Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to learn about insurance. There's education that needs to happen to make sure employees understand what they're getting. Do it in a way that makes your employees want to listen. (5) Make it Personalized. As Rob mentions, you can't be everything to everybody, but with a deep branching interactive experience you can make sure each employee gets only the information that they personally need and the education they personally care about.
Great resource! I added a bunch of the sites to my delicious account, Thanks for giving information to making the right choices.
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@Harry - Great points. I'm with you. (and glad you jumped in. I love talking about this stuff.) When it comes to an engaging interface, this is something that the Jellyvision BC does extremely well. I especially love the conversational/accessible tone you've given your counselors.
Congratulations on your results for the cable giant--another great example of how guidance tools generate measurable ROI. That FSA contribution increase makes for a solid ROI (in FICA tax savings) for the client. The really big cost savings opportunity guidance offers is in plan migrating, getting employees into a lower cost plan--especially when the client is introducing a CDHP. Guidance offers the twin rewards of helping employees (better decisions) and employers (saving money.)
@Steve - One of the challenges we designers of guidance apps face is the trade-offs between engaging & educational versus quick & simple. I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts on, when it comes to benefit guidance, whether employees value a quick/direct suggestion or depth/education? What's the investment employees are willing to make? Eight minutes? Five? Two? None?
@Rob -- Thanks! And agreed that there's big upside in getting employees into a lower cost plan. Employees who first look at high deductible plans often freak out - because they are only looking at that one scary number. A personal guide can actually do the math for them, factoring in the premium and their personal, expected out-of-pocket costs based on their own estimated usage. For many employees, when they see a CDHP plan stacked up next to their legacy plan, they can see with their own eyes that the new plan will likely cost them less by year's end.
On the trade-off question...ideally, there is no trade-off. You simply ask each participant whether they want to go more in depth at relevant points along the way. If they say "no," fine, move on. If they do, great, then they've essentially asked you to take a little extra time to explain what a deductible is or the difference between short and long term disability or whatever. With interactivity, you can expand or compress the duration of the experience based on each participant’s interests and time availability. Of course, if you can say something in 20 seconds instead of 40 seconds...then try to do it in 19. :-)
The content you have provided is pretty interesting and useful and I will surely take note of the point you have made in the blog.
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