BTHR "Road Warriors" Expertly Cover Open Enrollment meetings
Annual enrollment presents many challenges for every HR/Benefit department. After managing plan changes and communications development, annual enrollment often requires additional experienced resources to travel to company sites and lead open enrollment meetings. These meetings are critical to employee understanding and ultimately the success of the benefit program.
For a third year, our client Cornerstone Group needed senior level support to cover employee meetings for one of their clients with multiple locations around the country. They called on BTHR to provide highly-experienced HR professionals as “road warriors” to travel to those locations. Rather than pulling their own staff out of the office for nearly four weeks of travel, two BTHR contractors hit the road and held over 60 open enrollment meetings for employees!
“The BTHR contractors came into the office for a few hours of training and they learned about the plans and plan changes that they had to communicate,” said Andrea Lawton, HR Director at Cornerstone Group. “Because of their experience, they were able to present the benefit plans to the employees like they’d been working with them forever.”
“I was very comfortable with this assignment.” said Carroll Keough, one of the BTHR contractors who has over 25 years of experience working on annual enrollments. “I have conducted employee meetings many times before and enjoyed being able to address the employees’ concerns. Part of my role was to field employee questions regarding changes to their plans and minimize their anxiety,” said Carroll. Carroll presented at both union and non-union locations as well as to all levels of employees. “It was great that the company held face-to-face meetings. They provided an opportunity to enhance the employees’ understanding of their benefits.”
Pam Stenberg also traveled for Cornerstone as a BTHR contractor and has “a lot of experience doing road trips for benefit meetings. I’ve worked with a lot of corporate acquisitions so this assignment was a great fit for me,” says Pam. “The on-site meetings really helped the employees understand things about their benefits that they found confusing or didn’t know about.” Pam said. "I know how busy and stressful annual enrollment can be for the folks running things in the office, so in addition to providing great support to employees, one of my goals was also to ensure the meetings went flawlessly so Andrea and her team did not have to be concerned about what was going on in the field."
“Both Pam and Carroll showed a lot of empathy toward the employees which was really important,” says Andrea Lawton. “I think their involvement and the professional way they managed themselves and the employees added a great deal of value to our process.”
BTHR Solutions has the talent and flexibility to support the demands of every aspect of annual enrollment, including remote employee meetings. We are delighted that our “Road Warriors” were so successful for Cornerstone this year!
