Managing employee benefits can be a complex and costly endeavor. With an efficient benefits administration system, you could save a lot of money and effort. Benefits administration technology does away with manual processes and minimizes reporting errors for employees while making benefits easier for employees to utilize.
As an employer, you spend lots of money on health care as well as other benefits, but the presentations and the rollout to employees are not efficient. An administration system tries to find ways to help streamline the process and to communicate and engage with your employees.
The intrigues of health insurance drive much of the costs of benefits of administration for you, and many of the coverage questions arise from the complexities of health insurance. Numerous rules change constantly, therefore, it is not fair for HR teams to perform anything outside a technology solution.
According to this HR Technologist article, benefits inquiries account for more than 80 percent of emails, texts, as well as phone calls that HR teams handle. However, it is important to note that HR professionals can provide “higher-value support to workers with fewer resources” by embracing and streamlining benefits administration with technology.
Whether it is applied to a broader human capital management platform or used for standalone purposes, a benefits administration platform can help increase efficiency for you as an employer while improving the experience for your employees.
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Doing Away With Manual Processes
The benefits administration system automates the traditional employee benefits selection and management process. According to The Hortan Group, many insurance brokers and HR administrators make more than 34,000 manual carrier and enrollment adjustments each year. This is done at an average of five minutes per change, this totals 2,800 hours per year which translates to about 120 days.
Automating the process of carrying adjustments alone could lead to lots of significant savings based on the hourly expenses of brokers or administrators involved. A benefits administration system can therefore help to save time and money by making sure that functions are automated.
The automation helps in reconciling billing statements for insurers with premiums owned by your firm. Tracking of your employee’s defined contribution to an employee’s healthcare is also made possible. Automation of premium calculations for any partial health insurance enrollment coverage per an insurer’s wash rules is made possible.
There’s no longer a need to fill out endless amounts of paperwork to just sign up for benefits. Your employees can now make all of their decisions through digital systems. In some cases, the enrollment process can be automated, and can enroll them into a coverage plan once they are approved.
Minimizing Reporting Errors
The Affordable Care Act imposes a huge amount of information reporting responsibilities based on an employer’s health plan and the number of employees. As an Employer, you must report your employee’s healthcare coverage by filing information returns with the Internal Revenue Service and providing a statement on each individual. If your company is found non-compliant with this directive you could face millions of dollars in penalties.
Benefits administration technology can help you properly prepare and report the information on your employees. This includes the coverage details like the number of employees insured and each detail.
Improving Employee Experience
Your employees can engage with their benefits, thus enabling them to fully appreciate your contribution as an employer in covering their health expenses as well as their dependents. Your employees may not utilize their benefits if they do not comprehend their choices. For instance, without seeing a VA calculator an employee of yours that has previously served in the military may not know about military disability benefits that they could be entitled to. Not every employee gets the information they require from the paper enrolment process done during onboarding or any group meeting for open enrolment.
The benefits administration system enables your employees to access their benefits information at any time. This enables you as an employer, your employees along with other stakeholders to access the information conveniently from any location. This ease of access offers employees the chance to include others in their decision-making process, update their benefits if necessary, and even answer their queries.
A benefits administration system ensures that your employees get the necessary information on a range of benefits by showing them the different options that can meet their needs. This tool is of great importance because employers are offering multiple pans that involve higher deductible options.
Final Thoughts
Shifting regulations and evolving employee expectations make administering employee benefits challenging. But a benefits administration system can help you in streamlining your processes while improving your employees’ experience.
The benefits administration system also allows you as an employer to conveniently monitor your employees’ enrollment progress at any given time and can provide the data on enrollment per benefit offering
The benefits administration system helps in a multitude of ways. It not only helps in streamlining open enrollment but also creates an onboarding process that is smooth and simplified. It addresses any challenges involved in filling physical documents, and in turn, boosts your employee satisfaction which fosters a solid foundation for strong company culture.
