Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Amy Casciotti’s HR department faced major challenges engaging with employees ahead of open enrollment. Employees didn’t fully understand the company’s benefit offerings and often waited until the last minute to enroll.
“It was routinely that we’re coming into the last day of open enrollment, and we’d have 20-plus percent of our company that had not even started open enrollment, let alone completed it,” said Casciotti, the VP of HR for TechSmith, a screen capture and recording company based in East Lansing, Michigan. “If you have 20% of your company that’s not filling out their stuff, that’s a pretty big deal.”
Casciotti’s team looked inward, using the company’s own software tools to produce videos communicating essential information about benefits to employees ahead of open enrollment. She and Breanna Ramos, an HR specialist, say pivoting to video has helped boost TechSmith’s open enrollment rate from 80% to 100%. It has also given the team a chance to build trust among their employee base.
Drinking your own champagne. Ramos, who first started with TechSmith as an intern, has been with the company for more than eight and a half years. As an HR specialist, she oversees TechSmith’s HR information system, as well as compliance training and processes like enrollment.
In this role, Ramos said she’s often thinking about how to communicate complex concepts like benefits in digestible ways. She’s aware that TechSmith’s 300 or so employees have other aspects of their work life that can interfere with open enrollment, and that everyone learns differently. “Many employees don’t retain walls of text well,” Ramos told HR Brew.
The team came up with the idea to explore video production for open enrollment by drawing upon resources already at the HR team’s disposal. In other words, they decided, “We need to start drinking our own champagne, using the things that we make for this very purpose.”
Prior to using video for open enrollment, the HR team at TechSmith typically organized information sessions for employees that lasted about an hour and a half. While they still hold these sessions, Ramos and her colleagues also produce videos distilling essential information about open enrollment, as well as walking workers through the process of enrolling in benefits. The videos were rolled out in 2019, ahead of the 2020 open enrollment period.
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A three-minute video narrated by Casciotti during the last open enrollment period went through important dates and updates workers could expect to see in their benefits, such as changes to medical insurance premiums and new carriers. Ramos produced an 11-minute tutorial instructing employees on how to navigate the company’s Paycor system to enroll in benefits.
The HR team uses Camtasia, a TechSmith software tool, to produce the videos. Ramos said she can knock out a quick tutorial in an hour or two. As she’s become more comfortable using the software, she said she’s been able “to create even more engaging content.”
Currently, Ramos is working on an explainer video for the 2024 open enrollment period that will allow viewers to navigate an interactive table of contents and choose different videos based on their needs—from a quick, basic overview of benefits enrollment to videos that are more in-depth.
An opportunity for HR to shine. TechSmith chose a good time to migrate much of their open enrollment training to video. Since Casciotti’s team rolled out the videos in 2019, the company has shifted to hybrid work, requiring employees to be in the office just 20% of the time. With videos, “staff is digesting that information when it works for them,” and can reference it as many times as they need.
They also align with the learning style of many TechSmith employees, she added. “We’re a software company, we have a lot of very analytical employees…so it helps them to kind of be able to jump back and forth and refer back to the video.”
Before Casciotti’s team started producing videos, the benefit enrollment rate was typically around 80% by the time deadlines rolled around, she said. Last year, the open enrollment completion rate rose to 100%, she said.
Aside from spurring higher enrollment rates, Casciotti said the videos have given her team the opportunity to build trust with TechSmith employees. “It’s hard for me to meet and get to know everyone in the company, but through video, they get to see a little bit of me and my personality,” she said. Casciotti encourages her staff to let their personality shine through in the videos, too, “because it’s the only way our staff is going to feel comfortable coming to us for advice or when they have questions.”