Key Takeaways
- Open enrollment chaos is often self-inflicted by reactive communication strategies.
- By front-loading answers to predictable questions—like "what's changing?" and "when's the deadline?"—HR teams can dramatically reduce inbound volume.
- Optimizing self-service portals for actual usability and implementing triage strategies like office hours lets HR focus limited bandwidth on complex, high-stakes inquiries rather than repetitive clarifications.
- Empowering managers with a cheat sheet turns them into a useful first line of defense.
It's that time of year again. Your inbox is filling up. The same questions keep coming. People who ignored every communication you sent are suddenly urgent. And you're trying to handle it all while still doing the rest of your job.
Open enrollment is HR's version of tax season—predictable, intense, and somehow still chaotic every year. But most of the chaos is self-inflicted. Not because HR isn't working hard, but because the communication strategy is reactive instead of proactive. The same questions that consume HR time year-round multiply exponentially during this period.
Here's how to get ahead of it.
Predictable Questions, Predictable Answers
The questions employees ask during open enrollment are remarkably consistent. Year after year, it's the same set. Which means you can prepare for almost all of them before the first email lands in your inbox.
Here are the top ten, in roughly the order they'll arrive:
- What's changing this year?
- When does open enrollment start and end?
- What happens if I miss the deadline?
- Do I need to do anything if I want to keep my current plan?
- How do I add or remove a dependent?
- What's the difference between the plan options?
- How much will each plan cost me per paycheck?
- Is my doctor in-network under the new plan?
- What's the HSA/FSA contribution limit this year?
- How do I actually make my elections?
If you can answer these ten questions clearly and accessibly before enrollment opens, you've just eliminated the majority of your inbound volume.
Front-Load the Answers
The "Top Ten" FAQ Strategy
Take those ten questions and build a single, clean FAQ document. Not a 30-page benefits guide. Not a link to the carrier's website. A plain-language document that answers exactly what employees are actually asking.
Send it before enrollment opens. Pin it in Slack. Put it on the intranet homepage. Include it in every communication about open enrollment. Make it so easy to find that asking Sarah becomes harder than looking it up.
Pro tip: Write answers the way you'd explain them to a friend, not the way your benefits broker wrote them in the plan summary. Employees don't need legal precision—they need clarity.
Make Self-Service Actually Work
The Portal Audit
Before enrollment opens, sit down and try to complete the enrollment process as if you were an employee who's never done it before. Time yourself. Note every point of confusion.
Most benefits portals are designed by the vendor, not by you, and they're rarely intuitive. If the enrollment process takes more than ten minutes or requires more than five clicks, you're going to get tickets about it. An employee self-service knowledge base can significantly reduce this friction.
You may not be able to redesign the portal, but you can create a step-by-step walkthrough—with screenshots—that guides employees through the process. A two-minute video walkthrough is even better. When someone asks "how do I make my elections," you send the link instead of explaining it from scratch.
Create Office Hours Instead of an Open Door
Batching for Sanity
During open enrollment, the constant interruptions are what kill productivity. You're mid-task and someone pings you. You answer, get back to work, and another question arrives five minutes later. By the end of the day, you've answered twenty questions but completed nothing else.
Office hours change the dynamic. Set specific blocks—say, 11 AM to noon and 3 PM to 4 PM—where you're available for benefits questions. Drop-in, Zoom, Teams, whatever works. Outside those windows, auto-respond with the FAQ link and office hours schedule.
This isn't about being unavailable. It's about being strategically available so you can actually help people effectively instead of context-switching all day.
The counterintuitive truth: Employees actually get better help during office hours than through ad hoc messages. When you're focused on benefits questions, your answers are more thorough and more patient. When you're being interrupted, you're rushing.
Prepare Your Managers to Handle the First Wave
The Manager Cheat Sheet
Managers are the first people employees ask about benefits. And most managers have no idea how to answer. They either guess (dangerous) or immediately redirect to HR (unhelpful and adds to your volume).
Give managers a one-page cheat sheet before enrollment opens. It should cover:
- Key dates and deadlines
- What's changing this year (one paragraph)
- Where to direct employees for detailed questions (the FAQ, the portal, your office hours)
- What they should absolutely not try to answer (plan comparisons, coverage specifics, tax implications)
A five-minute investment in manager preparation saves you dozens of misdirected tickets.
Triage Ruthlessly During the Crunch
Even with preparation, questions will come. When they do, triage like an emergency room:
Urgent and complex: Someone's coverage is wrong. A life event is complicating their enrollment. A dependent has a medical need that's time-sensitive. These get your attention immediately.
Routine but time-sensitive: "I can't log into the portal." "The deadline is tomorrow, and I haven't enrolled yet." These need quick answers but not deep expertise. Templates and links handle most of them.
Routine and not urgent: "What's the difference between the PPO and the HDHP?" This is an FAQ question. Send the link. Don't re-explain what's already written down.
The goal isn't to be cold—it's to preserve your bandwidth for the situations that genuinely need a human being paying close attention.
After the Deadline: Capture What You Learned
Once enrollment closes, take 30 minutes to review what happened. What questions came up that weren't in your FAQ? What confused people that you didn't anticipate? Where did the process break down?
Write it down. Every question you didn't anticipate this year goes into next year's FAQ. Every process breakdown gets flagged for improvement. Every communication gap gets noted for next time.
Open enrollment happens every year. The teams that get better at it are the ones that treat each cycle as a learning opportunity, not just a survival exercise. Build a living document that gets smarter every year.
JoySuite can absorb a lot of open enrollment volume. Load your benefits information, and employees get instant answers—at midnight, on weekends, whenever they're thinking about it. Your queue shrinks. Your sanity survives.
