HR and benefit professionals, as well as their broker-adviser partners aren’t necessarily using the tools they believe to be most effective as their primary enrollment method, concludes recent surveys conducted by Employee Benefit News and Employee Benefit Adviser with Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Company.

The findings show that 80% and 82%, respectively of the more than 300 HR and benefit professionals polled rated individual sessions with a benefits counselor and group meetings as the most effective enrollment tools, followed by Web-based enrollments at 73%. Yet their primary method of enrolling employees was online (cited by 38%), with group meetings and call centers coming in at 24% and 20%, respectively, and individual sessions with a benefits counselor at distant 16%.

Similar results were recorded in responses from nearly 200 brokers and financial advisers polled. For example, 91% producers consider group meetings as the most effective enrollment tool, with individual sessions with benefits counselors a close second cited by 90%, followed by Web-based enrollments (73%), paper enrollments (65%) and call centers (43%). And although group meetings were the primary means of enrolling employees (45%), Web-based enrollments came in a distant second (20%). Only 17% cited individual sessions with benefits counselors and 15% named paper enrollments as their primary enrollment tool.

Employers, along with their brokers and advisers, “recognize one-to-one sessions with benefits counselors add real value, but many of them don’t realize they can take advantage of that kind of service at no cost to the company through a benefits partner,” according to Tom Gilligan, senior vice president of marketing and branding for Colonial Life. He suggests that in today’s difficult economy, they should “take advantage of all available resources to get maximum appreciation of the benefits they offer.”