What You Should Be Doing 6 Months Before Renewal

In my last post, I talked about the benefits of beginning your employee benefits renewal process today. It seems soon, but restarting your renewal cycle now will give you time to perform a deep analysis of your current programs and effectively increase employee engagement with your offerings.

Using an “untraditional” renewal timeline has helped me save one of my clients more than $50,000 in our first year.

Click here to read the post: The Best Time to Begin Your Renewal Process (Hint: It Isn’t When You Think)

If you’re ready to make a lasting change to your benefits program, here’s how to get started.

Resetting Your Renewal Timeline

Six months before your benefits renewal, ask your employee benefits consultant or broker to meet to discuss your goals. This should be an open-ended discussion about your overall business goals (i.e., not a price-setting meeting). Here are some questions to consider before this meeting:

• Is our team functioning efficiently? Would we like key team members to focus more on tasks or strategy?
• How is current employee retention and engagement? Where would we like it to be?
• What processes do we have in place to assure we are compliant with all state and federal employer regulations?
• Where do we want to be in 5 years, and what is holding us back?

These long-term strategy questions can seem overwhelming at first and may not appear to have a direct connection to your benefits strategy. But thinking critically about your overall business strategy is a key piece to beginning a benefits program that effectively works to increase your business efficiency and profitability.

Once you determine 2-3 areas in your business processes that currently need improvement, you will have a clear idea of what to discuss with your employee benefits consultant. As consultants, it’s our goal to help your business succeed, and we have a variety of resources to help you beyond placing your insurance coverages and helping with enrollment.

An uncomfortable but important note: If you request this process and find your broker isn’t receptive to having a strategic conversation, or tells you to wait until renewal approaches, use the next few weeks reaching out to other employee benefits firms to find a consultant whose values better align with yours.

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