Let the Year-end Triathlon Begin
Multiple disciplines, each with its own skill set, stacked back to back, with no recovery time between legs
Every fall, someone on a benefits team calls it a sprint to the finish. Someone else calls it a marathon. Both are right, and both are incomplete.
A sprint implies a short burst of effort. A marathon implies one long, steady push. What benefits teams actually face this time of year is neither. It is more comparable to a triathlon. Multiple disciplines, each with its own skill set, stacked back-to-back, with no recovery time between legs.
You do not get to be good at only one part. You have to be good at all of them, in sequence, while exhausted from the one before it.
Five Legs, One Race
1️⃣ Plan design
The strategic groundwork. Contribution limits, plan changes, new offerings, vendor decisions. This work often finishes months before anyone outside the benefits team notices it happened.
2️⃣ Education
Turning design decisions into something employees can actually understand. This is where technical accuracy has to become plain language, or none of the good design work will land.
3️⃣ Financial decision making
Employees are being asked to predict their own future. How much will they spend on care next year. What they can afford to set aside. Most people are not equipped to answer that question with confidence, and the benefit only works if they try anyway.
4️⃣ Emotional management
Rarely called out, but somehow always present. Employees carry stress, uncertainty, and sometimes real fear about health and money into open enrollment. Benefits teams manage that emotional weight whether or not it is part of anyone's job description.
5️⃣ Timely execution
Communications, open enrollment windows, year-end reminders, new plan year expectations. They all have to land at the right moment. Too early and it gets forgotten. Too late and it gets ignored. Too much at once and overwhelm takes over.
Why the Metaphor Matters
A sprint mindset burns people out by week two. A marathon mindset misses the moments that require a sudden burst of speed, like a compliance deadline or a last-minute plan change. Neither framing prepares a team for what this season actually demands.
A triathlon does. It requires range. It requires knowing when to shift disciplines. It requires pacing yourself through the parts nobody sees so you have something left for the parts everybody feels.
The Part We Need to Say Out Loud
Most year-end retrospectives measure success by enrollment numbers or ticket volume. Those numbers matter, but they do not capture the range of skill it took to get there. Plan design expertise does not automatically make someone a strong communicator. Communication skill does not automatically make someone equipped to understand an employee's financial anxiety. Doing all five well, in the same six to ten week window, is the real achievement, and it rarely gets named.
If your team is in the middle of this race right now, you already know which leg is hardest for you. Is it the plan design, the education, the financial decision-making, the emotional management, or the execution that stretches your team the most this time of year?
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