Dreading Open Enrollment? You Don’t Have To

There are many ways to attract and retain exceptional employees for your business. Obviously, offering a good salary is one of the most important. But if you truly want top talent to join your ranks and remain engaged employees for years to come, providing competitive benefits packages is just as important, if not more so. In fact, a 2018 Aflac study found that “over half of employees surveyed (55%) would be at least somewhat likely to accept a job with lower compensation but a more robust benefits package.”

That being said, offering employee benefits programs and managing employee benefits programs are two very different things.

Managing employee benefits means educating employees about their options, assisting them in the enrollment process, keeping track of all that data and making sure the information is processed correctly so your employees are taken care of. For business owners and administrators, it can also mean dealing with a sizeable headache and a whole lot of paperwork.

But cutting the stress of managing such programs can be as simple as outsourcing the lion’s share of the work by implementing a Benefits Administration System.

Simply put, a Benefits Administration System, or Benefits Enrollment System, is a digital, automated software that takes care of all the minutiae of enrolling employees in your plan offerings and keeps track of their use, so you don’t have to. Sounds great, right?

Here are five reasons why such a system could benefit (see what we did there?) both business owners and employees alike:

Benefits Administration Systems are a time saver.

Let’s be honest: Nobody enjoys filling out paperwork. It’s boring, tedious and it takes time. And as the old adage says, Time is money.

By doing things the old fashioned way through an open enrollment meeting, employees end up spending the bulk of the time manually filling out the same information for each benefit enrollment form whether it be health insurance, or vision, or dental, etc.

“Basically at that point, you’ve signed your name four or five times and filled out literally the exact same information over and over,” says Complete Payroll Services president Andrew King.

“With the Benefits Enrollment System, the software has summaries of all the benefits offered pre-loaded,” he explains. “You fill in all your information once, and then it’s more of a checklist where you can easily select which plan options you want to enroll in your benefits.”

So by adding some automation to the benefits enrollment process, it saves employees and managers time that can be better spent doing what they were hired for—their core business functions—all of which ultimately benefit the company.

They allow your HR department to focus on the most important part of their jobs: your employees.

When your HR managers are responsible for manually enrolling employees in your benefits program, that means devoting countless hours to answering employee questions about the process, gathering important information and entering data.

An HR person doesn’t want to be stuck in the monotonous duty of passing someone a form across a desk and watching them fill it out. If your HR person has cleared all of the responsibility of sliding paper across the desk, they’re gonna have time to address the more specific questions that they’re getting paid to answer.”

They give employees more confidence.

Employees are better equipped to select the benefits plans that are right for them when your HR managers are able to spend more time communicating with your employees

With a Benefits Administration System, the employee is much more involved in the process, King says. “In fact, they take on most of the workload,” he explains. “Also, it’s usually a lot more intuitive for the employee. There’s not as much to navigate or to fill out.”

At the end of the day, the whole point of offering benefits to your employees is to increase their workplace satisfaction by giving them some peace of mind. When your employees are more informed about the true value of their benefits, it decreases anxiety and confusion, resulting in employees who are more engaged with their jobs.

Benefits Administration Systems are better for the environment.

Managing your company’s benefits program through a digital Benefits Administration System greatly decreases your reliance on paper products, which in turn puts less stress on the environment. It’s that simple!

They provide better visibility for your benefits data.

By using a Benefits Administration System, all of your benefits data is stored in one place.

“You have that data in a much more reportable format that you can always refer back to, especially if it’s wrapped up in the HR system,” King says. “So if someone says to me one day, How many people have the medical plan?—I don’t have to go comb through all of the paperwork. Now I can just go to my benefit system, and I can probably just have a one-click report that says, Here are all the people that have medical, and not only that, but here’s what plan they have. And all of that information is right at your fingertips.”

Offering employee benefits doesn’t have to be the chore that it used to be, and it doesn’t have to be as time-consuming either.

When you’re able to delegate and automate most of the work involved with employee enrollment through a Benefits Administration System, everyone wins—from the employees to their HR managers to the business owner, themselves.

There’s no one way to ensure workplace satisfaction. However, when employees can feel confident that they’re being taken care of by their employer and they can devote their time toward producing quality work, everybody benefits.