Key Takeaways

• Your benefits guide should help employees make decisions, not store every benefits detail.
• Effective open enrollment communications focus on the answers employees need most: what’s changing, what to do, and where to get help.
• Clear, concise benefits guides improve employee understanding and engagement during open enrollment.
• Regularly audit and simplify enrollment materials to reduce clutter and create a better employee experience.

More Information Isn’t Always Better

Every open enrollment season, organizations invest significant time and effort into creating a benefits guide. I’ve seen benefits guides grow from 12 pages to 40 pages over the years. Every department wants more sections, explanations, and resources.

But employees are asking for clearer answers, not more pages. And if your benefits guide feels more like a storage unit than a guide, your employees probably aren’t reading it.

Open enrollment guides should help employees understand, evaluate, and use their benefits, not overwhelm them with dense content and technical terminology. The goal isn’t to include everything—it’s to include what really matters to your people.

As employee benefits communicators, we need to shift our mindset from “What information should we include?” to “What information does the employee need to make a decision?”

What Employees Actually Need During Open Enrollment

When building your guide, you need to take off your HR and benefits hat and think like an employee. During a busy day, your people might not have time to glance at the guide until a quick break between meetings or after their kids go to bed. They’re not looking for a detailed explanation of plan administration. They need answers to practical questions, like:

• What’s changing this year?
• How much will my benefits cost?
• Which plan is right for me and my family?
• Where can I get help?

If employees can’t find those answers quickly, the guide isn’t doing its job. Our health insurance system is complex, and your team deserves support while navigating it.

Don’t Make Employees Work for Answers

The most effective benefit guides are:

• Easy to scan
• Written in plain language
• Organized logically
• Focused on key decisions

Use headings, bullets, comparison charts, and visuals to make information easy to digest. Avoid lengthy explanations, technical jargon, and duplicate content.

Most of us skim long documents to identify key information before digging into the details. Your guide needs to be optimized for this behavior instead of assuming employees will read every word.

Make Every Page Earn Its Place

One of the best practices in benefits communications is to regularly audit your content. If information is outdated, duplicated, or rarely used, remove it. When possible, link to additional resources instead of including every detail in the guide.

Most benefits guides are too long. Not because the information is bad, but because nobody has made the hard decision about what employees truly need to know during open enrollment.

If a page doesn’t help employees make a decision, answer a question, or take action, it probably doesn’t belong in the guide. That can be a tough standard (and we all know it’s not always possible), but it’s worth working towards.

Your Guide Can Be a Superhero Instead of Storage

“With a great benefits guide comes great responsibility.” At least I think that’s how the quote goes. If there’s one thing to take away from this blog, it’s that a great open enrollment guide isn’t measured by how much information it contains. It’s measured by how well it helps employees take action.

As you prepare for open enrollment, remember: your benefit guide should be a guide, not a storage unit. Before you add another page, ask one question:

“Will this help an employee make a better decision?”

If the answer is no, it may belong somewhere else. The best benefits guides are the ones employees actually use.

Communication teams that focus on clarity, simplicity, and employee experience create better enrollment outcomes. Holmes Murphy’s employee benefits communications team helps organizations simplify complex information, improve employee understanding, and create enrollment experiences that work. Whether you’re planning for this enrollment season or already looking ahead to the next, we’d love to start a conversation about unlocking your unique potential.