TL;DR

Open Enrollment moves fast — too fast for most HR teams to document what actually worked and what didn’t. A post-OE survey helps you capture the employee experience while it’s still fresh, revealing what landed, what confused people, and what needs to change before next year. The best surveys are short, structured by theme, and designed for easy analysis. And with tools like Selerix, distribution and reporting can be automated so you don’t have to add more work to your plate during an already busy season. 

Why Conduct a Post-Open Enrollment Survey

If your last OE felt like a blur, you’re in good company. When you’re juggling vendor calls, last-minute plan updates, eligibility questions, employee reminders, data checks, and system deadlines, sitting down to take detailed notes is… not happening. Most HR and benefits teams wrap OE feeling relieved, exhausted, and unsure where the biggest friction points actually were.

Meanwhile, employees are having their own whirlwind experience. They’re reading dense plan descriptions, trying to compare deductibles, and pinging HR with “quick questions” that are anything but quick. They’re rushing to make the right choice, or at least not make a wrong one. No wonder 7 in 10 employees told us they spend less than an hour making their selections, and many do it from home, on their own, with limited support .

Here’s the challenge: When OE is hectic for everyone, assumptions fill the gaps. HR teams, wanting to improve the open enrollment process, are left guessing at what employees struggled with. Leadership guesses what messaging wasn’t clear. Employees guess at what benefits actually mean.

A post-open enrollment survey stops the guessing.

It gives you something rare: unfiltered, real-time visibility into the employee experience — what was clear, what was confusing, what they wish they’d known sooner, and where support fell short. And because employees just lived it, their answers are specific, candid, and incredibly actionable.

There’s also a real cost to skipping this step. In the 2025 Selerix Employee Benefits Survey, only 27% of employees said they understand their benefits “perfectly,” and more than one in three reported regretting a choice they made during enrollment. Confusion during OE won’t stay in OE, but spill into trust, satisfaction, well-being, and even compliance issues later.

A quick, well-structured post-OE survey helps you:

• Understand where employees struggled
• Identify which communications connected (and which didn’t)
• Spot patterns across teams, generations, locations, or job types
• Capture the sentiment behind the experience — not just the steps
• Prioritize fixes before next year’s planning cycle begins

In other words: it’s the simplest, most reliable way to turn a hectic, high-stakes season into a smarter, smoother one next year. 

When to Send the Survey (and Who to Include) 

When should you plan to send your survey so that it gets attention but the experience is still fresh? Keep in mind that timing will affect how people respond. You want experiences to be fresh, but not raw. The best timing is within 1–2 weeks after OE closes — while memories are still specific and actionable and employee benefits feedback is likely to be most impactful.

Who should receive it:

• All benefits-eligible employees
• Include spouses/partners if they actively participate in decisions (a surprising number do)

How to distribute:

• Email
• SMS
• Push notifications 

The easier the survey is to access (especially on mobile) the higher the completion rate will be.

Pro tip: If you’re a Selerix customer, use your Engage employee communications platform to automate the survey, and you can even write the emails using our Content Assist AI tool.

How to Structure Your Open Enrollment Survey

With a clear date in mind, how should you structure and write your enrollment survey so that it captures the real experience for employees, and offers feedback that will improve future OE periods? A clear structure helps you avoid survey fatigue and ensures the insights you gather are actually usable. Here’s a model that our customers find consistently works well, and is most useful when it comes to analyze employee feedback:

Start With a Clear Goal

Before you write a single question, decide what you’re trying to learn. OE feedback can go in a hundred different directions. Ask yourself: What decisions will this survey help me make?

Examples:

• Improve communication clarity
• Simplify the enrollment platform experience
• Identify pain points for specific employee groups
• Evaluate how well new benefits were understood
• Measure confidence and satisfaction

Your survey should help you answer those questions, not overwhelm you with noise. If a question doesn’t help you make a decision about future open enrollment or benefits, cut it.

Organize Questions by Feedback Theme

Employees can answer quickly, and HR can analyze patterns easily, when questions fall into predictable buckets:

1. Overall Satisfaction
“How satisfied were you with your OE experience this year?”

2. Communication Clarity
This is a big one, especially since many employees report unclear benefits communication in national data (and in Selerix’s own survey).

3. System Usability
“Was the platform intuitive? Anything confusing or hard to find?”

4. Decision Support
“Did the tools, guides, calculators, or help sessions actually help?”

5. Plan Selection Confidence
“Do you feel confident you picked the right coverage for your needs?”

6. Suggestions + Open-Ended Feedback
“What’s one thing we could do to make OE easier next year?”

This grouping mirrors the way many organizations internally debrief OE, which makes your data much easier to present to leadership and brokers.

Keep It Short and Focused

Aim for 10–12 questions, with no more than 2–3 open-ended prompts. Anything longer and response rates drop fast.

Use a Mix of Question Types

• Likert scales — which typically use a 5- or 7-point system, ranging from one extreme to the other, and feature a set of options like “Strongly Agree,” “Agree,” “Neutral,” “Disagree,” and “Strongly Disagree” — will help make satisfaction measurable
  
• Multiple choice reduces fatigue, and allows you to include more questions in your survey.
  
• Questions with open-ended fields uncover issues you wouldn’t think to ask about, but they can be tiring for employees to answer. Try to limit to 1 or 2 only.
  
• Branching questions and using logic can help you target experiences and understand why someone is answering as they are  (e.g., “If you attended a webinar…”)
   

Ensure Anonymity for Honest Feedback

If people think their response can be traced back to them, they’ll grade the process… not the reality.

They’ll say things like “overall it was fine” instead of “the portal kept breaking on mobile and I almost gave up” or “I only chose that plan because I ran out of time.” That kind of soft, polite feedback doesn’t help you fix anything.

Anonymous surveys flip that dynamic.

When employees know their answers cannot be tied to their name, manager, or location, they’re far more likely to:

• Call out confusing emails or mixed messages
• Admit they didn’t understand certain plans or acronyms
• Share where they felt rushed, stressed, or unsupported
• Suggest changes they might otherwise keep to themselves

A few ways to reinforce anonymity in practice:

• Use a neutral sender. Instead of sending from an individual HR mailbox, send from your HR/benefits inbox or via your Selerix platform with clear language that responses are aggregated.
  
• State it plainly in the intro. Say: “This survey is anonymous. We’ll only look at results in aggregate — not by individual.”
  
• Avoid hyper-specific demographics. Don’t ask for so many details (team, level, location, tenure, manager) that an employee in a small group can be easily identified.
  
• Share results at a group level. When you present survey outcomes back to leadership or employees, use overall themes or segments, not small pockets of data.
  

If you want to enable more targeted analysis (for example, by location or job type), consider optional demographic questions with ranges (e.g., “operations / administrative / leadership”) instead of exact roles. That gives you enough structure to see patterns without making individuals feel exposed. Anonymity, in this case, can build trust. 

Make It Mobile-Friendly

Think about when your employees are most likely to answer this survey. It’s probably not while they’re sitting at a perfect desk setup with two monitors and a quiet afternoon. It’s more likely:

• On a phone during a commute
• On a couch after dinner
• In between tasks on a shop floor or at a nurse’s station
• While juggling kids, laundry, or a second job

In our Selerix research, we found a large share of employees report making their benefits decisions at home or “on the go,” not at a desk . Your survey needs to work in that reality.

To make it genuinely mobile-friendly:

• Use a responsive survey tool. Make sure the layout automatically adjusts to smaller screens — no awkward pinching and zooming.
  
• Keep questions scannable. Short prompts, short answer options. Long paragraphs are painful on a phone.
  
• Avoid giant matrices. Those 5×5 rating grids that look fine on a laptop can be a nightmare to scroll through on mobile. Break them into separate questions instead.
  
• Limit typing where possible. Use Likert scales and multiple-choice questions for the bulk of the survey and reserve free-text questions for the most important prompts.
  
• Test it yourself. Open the survey on your own phone (and, ideally, a colleague’s) before you launch it. If you’re annoyed, your employees will be too.

If you’re already using Selerix for employee communication, this is where it can help: sending the survey via email and mobile-friendly links or notifications can significantly boost completion for deskless and frontline workers who rarely check intranet pages.

The goal is simple: if employees can tap, swipe, and be done in a few minutes, they’ll respond. If they have to zoom, scroll sideways, or fight a login, they’ll bail.

Consider Accessibility Needs

Accessibility isn’t just a legal or compliance box to check but a respect issue. The employees who have the hardest time with OE (because of language, vision, neurodiversity, or tech comfort) are often the ones whose feedback you most need. If your survey isn’t accessible, you’re automatically filtering out a significant part of your workforce.

A few practical ways to build accessibility in:

• Use plain language. Swap out all your jargon (like “HDHP,” “OOP max,” “voluntary ancillary products”) for terms employees actually use and, where needed, define them briefly in the question text.
  
• Write one idea per question. “How did you feel about the clarity and timing of communications and the usefulness of webinars?” is really three questions in a trench coat. Split them up.
  
• Follow basic readability rules. Use a clear sans-serif font, at least 12–14px equivalent, with good contrast between text and background. Avoid walls of bold or ALL CAPS.
  
• Make it screen-reader friendly. Ensure form fields and answer choices have labels, and avoid using images or icons as the only way to convey meaning.
  
• Offer language support if needed. If you have a multilingual workforce, consider offering the survey in the top one or two languages in your organization. Even a short “need help? contact us” note in another language can make a difference.
  
• Keep navigation predictable. Linear, one-direction flows are easiest to follow. Avoid jumping back and forth unless absolutely necessary.

You can also add a quick note at the top. Something like: “If you need this survey in another format to participate (for example, another language or a printed copy), please contact [HR contact].” That simple line can signal that every voice is welcome in the process, not just the ones for whom digital surveys are already easy.

Maintain Consistency Year Over Year

Your first post-OE survey will give you a great snapshot of what happened this year. But the real power shows up when you can compare this year’s experience to next year’s, and compare results from one year to the next. That only works if you resist the urge to reinvent the survey every time.

Here’s a solid approach:

1. Create a small “core” set of questions that stay the same each year—things like:
   
   • Overall OE satisfaction
   • Clarity of communications
   • Ease of using the platform
   • Confidence in benefit choices
     
2. Layer in a few rotating questions based on what changed this year, such as:
   
   • A new medical plan or carrier
   • A new voluntary benefit (e.g., mental health resources, financial wellness, legal benefits)
   • A new communication channel or decision-support tool
     
3. Track trends, and not just scores. It’s useful to know that, for example, communication clarity is currently at 3.8 out of 5. It’s more useful to see that it went from 3.1 to 3.5 to 3.8 over three years as you adjusted your strategy.
   
4. Align survey themes with your OE roadmap. If you’re following a year-round OE strategy (like the Selerix Open Enrollment Roadmap that encourages feedback early and often) , keep your survey aligned with the phases you care about most: communication, decision support, platform, and follow-through.
   
5. Share back what’s changed year over year. Employees are much more likely to keep responding if they can see that their feedback led to real change, such as:
   
   • “Last year you told us webinars were too dense. This year, we shortened them and added quick-hit videos.”
     
   • “You asked for clearer plan comparisons. We added a side-by-side tool and revamped our emails.”

Consistency doesn’t mean rigidity. You’re not locking yourself into the same survey forever. You’re preserving enough sameness to show progress over time, while giving yourself just enough flexibility to focus on what’s new or pressing in any given year.

That’s what turns a one-off “how did we do?” poll into a continuous improvement engine for your benefits experience.

Offer an Incentive for Participation (Optional)

Survey incentives aren’t required, but they do move the needle for organizations with large frontline or deskless workforces.

You don’t have to go big. Small, simple incentives can significantly boost response rates:

• A raffle for a $25 or $50 gift card 
• A company swag item
• Coffee vouchers or lunch perks

If you’d rather skip prizes, another effective approach is positioning the survey as part of your overall EX (employee experience) strategy:  “We’re improving next year’s OE based on your feedback, help us shape it.”

Employees respond when they feel heard, not bribed, so this incentive is just a nudge that gets them started. 

Pilot Test Before Sending

Before you share your survey with hundreds (or thousands) of employees, do a quick dry run with:

• 3–5 people from HR
• 3–5 employees outside the HR bubble
• At least one mobile-only user

Ask them:

• Did any question feel unclear?
• Did any question feel redundant?
• Did the survey feel too long?
• Were there any technical hiccups on mobile?

This mini-test catches things you won’t notice, especially phrasing that makes perfect sense to HR but not to the average employee. 

Distribute via Multiple Channels

Just like during OE, you can’t rely on a single communication method and hope everyone sees it. A multi-channel approach ensures the widest reach:

• Email: Still the standard for most employees. Rely on tools like Selerix Content Assist to help write emails more quickly and effectively.
  
• SMS/Text: Great for deskless populations or any workforce with low email usage. Selerix Engage can help here too, to meet employees with personalized messages.
  
• Intranet: Post the link in a banner or news tile where it’s visible.
  
• Selerix Engage Notifications: Push a link directly to employees within the platform they already use.
  
• QR codes: Useful for manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and other non-desk environments.

The more convenient you make it, the higher your completion rate.

Example Post-Open Enrollment Survey Questions

Here’s a short set you can use immediately, or adapt to your organization’s needs.
This follows the structure you’ve already established, where satisfaction leads to clarity, usability, support, confidence and employee suggestions.

Section 1: Overall Experience

1. How would you rate your overall experience with this year’s Open Enrollment?
   • Very satisfied / Somewhat satisfied / Neutral / Somewhat dissatisfied / Very dissatisfied
     
2. What part of OE worked best for you this year?
   • Choices of various elements of your OE experience.

Section 2: Communication Clarity

3. How clear and timely were the OE communications you received?
   • Very clear / Somewhat clear / Neutral / Somewhat unclear / Very unclear
     
4. Which communication channels helped you most?
   • Email / Text / Intranet / Webinars / Printed materials / Selerix platform messages
     

Section 3: Platform & Tools

5. How easy was it to navigate the enrollment platform?
   • A scale of very easy to very difficult
     
6. Did the tools or resources provided (videos, guides, comparison charts, calculators) help you make informed decisions?
   • Yes, very helpful / Somewhat / Neutral / Not very / Not at all
     
7. Were there any tools you wish had been available?
   (Open-ended)

Section 4: Confidence & Support

8. How confident are you that you chose the right benefits for your needs?
   • Very confident → Not at all confident
     
9. Did you feel supported if you had questions?
   • Yes / Somewhat / No

Section 5: Suggestions

10. What one improvement would make next year’s Open Enrollment easier for you?
    (Open-ended)

Improve Open Enrollment Year Over Year with Selerix

A post-OE survey is only useful if you can actually act on the insights — and that’s where Selerix’s platform makes the difference.

Here’s how Selerix helps HR teams turn feedback into progress:

✔ Automated Distribution & Reminders

Use Engage to send your survey link through email, SMS, or in-platform notifications — the channels employees already use. Automated reminders help you drive responses without manually tracking who hasn’t replied.

✔ Easy Data Collection & Reporting

Once responses come in, Selerix gives you a clean, consolidated view of your data so you can quickly identify issues with no spreadsheets required.

• Communication gaps
• Patterns by location or job type
• Platform pain points
• Confidence issues
• Areas where employees felt overwhelmed or unsupported

✔ Insights That Inform Your Year-Round OE Strategy

Survey results slot directly into the Selerix year-round OE roadmap (Month 1: OE Wrap-Up & Feedback), helping you:

• Prioritize the updates employees will notice most
• Build a smarter communication plan
• Improve clarity and personalization
• Strengthen decision-support resources

Employees want clarity and confidence,and Selerix helps you deliver it. 

Conclusion  

Open Enrollment moves fast, and it’s hard to see clearly when you’re in the middle of it. That’s why the most effective HR teams don’t rely on guesswork, they ask employees directly while the experience is still fresh.

A thoughtful post-OE survey as part of an open enrollment strategy gives you the insight you need to:

• Reduce confusion
• Improve communication
• Strengthen decision support
• Boost satisfaction and trust
• Build a better OE process every year

With Selerix’s communication tools, enrollment platform, and analytics capabilities, you can turn feedback into a better benefits experience, not just next year, but all year long.

Ready to make next year’s OE smoother, clearer, and more employee-friendly?
Let’s build it together. Talk to a Selerix expert