Each year, businesses prepare for open enrollment season and the challenge of designing, presenting, and managing employee benefits. Many companies still outline new or additional insurance benefits through in-person, one-on-one meetings between employees and HR representatives. This approach often leaves employees feeling rushed or confused about their options and requires a host of manual actions after the meeting to ensure completed enrollment, payroll integration, timely reporting, and legal compliance.
In this article, we’ll explore how HR software can help your business streamline and simplify open enrollment season to greatly improve benefits administration and employee satisfaction.
Reduces Labor Time & Related Expenses
Open enrollment season is typically a demanding time for HR professionals, who must juggle in-person meetings with employees, followed by manual administrative work, mailing preparation, and compliance concerns. Explaining benefits plans to employees and answering nuanced questions is difficult enough without all of the additional paperwork and related costs that follow.
Additionally, consider that employees who lack 24-7 access to benefits information through HR software may use company time to review the plans, particularly since their in-person HR meeting will occur during business hours and detract from key tasks that could be completed by both parties if using HR software instead.
For HR professionals and employees alike, HR software automates the core functions of open enrollment, which reduces labor time and lets HR professionals answer questions that arise after all employees have reviewed the organized benefits materials provided through the HR software.
Improves Communication
HR software streamlines the process of communicating key policy changes and new or additional benefits that will be offered during the open enrollment period. With HR software, your business can schedule automated emails to staff in the weeks leading up to open enrollment, and provide everything your employees will need to understand important dates, deadlines, plan offerings, and enrollment instructions. You can also automate periodic reminders to employees as you get closer to the end of the enrollment period, which will communicate which information or tasks need to be completed by an employee to complete the enrollment process.
Encourages Employee Research & Reduces Pressure
Although in-person open enrollment meetings between HR professionals and employees are designed to ensure accessibility and transparency, one major downside is that this one “consolidated” meeting can be stressful from the employee perspective. For instance, the employee may not have received advanced information regarding the available plans, or they may need a longer period of time to evaluate the full range of options and instead feel pressured to decide in person on an arbitrary date and time.
The upside of HR software is that it grants employees full access to plan details, which they can review at their own pace and on their own time. They are empowered to make more informed, thoughtful, and measured decisions. With a host of online resources, the research and enrollment tasks are left to them, with the company’s HR professionals available should more specific questions arise in the process. With HR software, your HR staff can focus on answering a reasonable number of context-dependent questions as opposed to repeatedly presenting the same general information or answering the same questions, which can be relayed through HR software instead. Additionally, using an online platform grants employees 24-7 access to information and eliminates the need for HR staff to gather a wide variety of forms from each employee and mail them on time to each necessary carrier.
Integrates with Payroll & Reduces Errors
Errors often occur as result of manual salary withdrawals, especially when new or changed benefits premiums are withdrawn from an employee’s paycheck. With HR software, once benefits plans have been chosen, information is immediately integrated into payroll, automating deductions from that point on. This not only ensures accuracy, but improves communication with the carrier, eliminating the need for any manual entry of information that could lead to errors. It also allows employees to review their deductions at will, providing transparency about the process.
During open enrollment, HR software also automatically prevents employees from applying to plans they don’t qualify for, directing them instead to eligible plans, which saves them time and minimizes frustration with the enrollment process.
Ensure Compliance & Accurate Reporting
As benefits administration becomes more and more complex, manual processes are increasingly susceptible to human error, which could leave your business fielding costly fines, penalties, or audits.
HR software protects your business against issues with missing information or form fields, guaranteeing that all necessary data is collected and approved in an accurate and timely way – for tax purposes, ACA analysis/compliance, and more.
Streamline Open Enrollment with Workforce PayHub
Navigating open enrollment season can be a complex and challenging process for any business. It’s important for your HR staff and employees to feel confident in the tools and resources you use to provide benefits in a streamlined and transparent way. By using HR software, you can not only cut labor costs related to benefits administration but improve employee satisfaction and ensure ongoing legal compliance. Workforce PayHub offers comprehensive HCM software that helps you meet all of your open enrollment goals, providing user-friendly features that simplify benefits administration for everyone in your business. Ready to make enrollment season hassle-free? Contact us today to start our collaboration.
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