When it comes to benefits education, “personalization” should mean more than including an employee’s first name in the salutation. Employees engage with benefits information differently depending on their circumstances. Data on user behavior highlights a key insight: Open Enrollment and New Hire Onboarding require distinct decision support strategies to ensure employees receive the right information at the right time—and in the right way.
What the Data Says
Open Enrollment
Employees going through Open Enrollment typically see benefits selection as an annual task to complete rather than an opportunity for meaningful decision-making. PERKY user data trends reveal the following about employee behaviors:
- Emotions: Annoyed, overwhelmed, and often treating benefits selection as a checklist item rather than an opportunity for proactive decision-making.
- Time willing to invest in learning about benefits: 3-6 minutes
- Benefit priorities: Employees focus on what has changed rather than reviewing everything from scratch.
- How to reach them: They engage with benefits information when it’s convenient for them—and the employee is not always the household decision maker.
New Hires
New employees engage with benefits differently than existing employees. Their mindset is focused on understanding their options rather than simply reviewing changes. PERKY user data trends reveals the following about employee behaviors:
- Emotions: Eager to make informed choices but may also feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new information.
- Time willing to invest in learning about benefits: 11-14 minutes
- Benefit priorities: They’re more focused on what’s relevant to their personal and family needs.
- How to reach them: A structured and strategic onboarding session is key.
What Does This Mean?
The data makes it clear that Open Enrollment and New Hire Onboarding require personalized engagement strategies. Open Enrollment needs quick, targeted communication that acknowledges employees’ limited time and attention span. Meanwhile, New Hire Onboarding benefits from structured guidance and interactive decision support, ensuring employees feel excited about the many investments their new organization makes on the employees’ behalf. Without personalization, organizations put the employee experience at risk – potentially enabling the employees to make uninformed benefits selections, and risking dissatisfaction, underutilization, and even financial and mental stress.
How to Customize This for Your Organization
A Journey Mapping approach can help organizations tailor benefits communication effectively. By mapping out key touchpoints through the employee lifecycle organizations you can understand:
- Awareness: By identifying where employees are most likely to access benefits information to understand their benefit options.
- Engagement: By determining the best format for delivery you can determine how to keep your employees active in the benefits conversation.
- Satisfaction: By ensuring messaging aligns with employee emotions and priorities can help the employees feel heard and supported, making benefits feel relevant rather than an administrative burden.
Utilizing these data metrics can help track milestones and success based on your organization’s goals. By diving deep into your employee demographics, benefits strategy, and utilization trends, you can uncover key insights to guide your next steps—both in the short and long term.
Leveraging data-driven insights and journey mapping allows organizations to transform benefits education into a strategic advantage—improving decision making, increasing engagement, and ensuring a better employee experience at critical moments in an employee’s life that matters the most.
Worried about scaling this level of personalization with your already strained HR team? That’s where PERKY technology can bridge the gap between personalization and a human touch.
LIMRA. (2025, February). 2024 Beat Study: Benefits and Employee Attitude Tracker Series. https://www.limra.com/1
