No business is ever the same year in, year out. Industries may shift, customers’ needs may evolve, and your teams could look very different from when the company started. Your operations may have changed as you’ve grown as well, allowing you to explore more efficient ways to handle both internal and external processes.
A common side effect of industry changes over the years has been an increase in businesses offering hybrid or remote work for their employees. This has created much more flexibility in how to grow businesses while also allowing them to scale more cost-effectively.
However, having this type of unique business structure also means that managing essential functions like compensation and employee benefits needs to mature. To facilitate this maturity, many businesses invest in best-of-breed technologies to help them operate more efficiently while enabling key support teams, such as HR, to automate many of their critical support processes.
Below, we’ll touch on the various strategies businesses can use to leverage their benefits technology as they grow.
Establish a Centralized Benefits Hub
When managing a growing team, it can often be difficult to balance important elements like benefits coordination with other key HR workloads. To counter this problem, it’s essential to have a unified digital platform that enables you to simplify benefits enrollment procedures while also educating employees about all their coverage options.
One of the primary advantages of having a centralized benefits hub is that support for both HR teams and employees is always available. Employees can log in and get fast answers to their benefits-related questions while reviewing their insurance coverage choices. At the same time, these platforms seamlessly connect with other HR systems, such as payroll and insurance providers, helping teams manage employee data more efficiently while reducing human error.
In addition to helping employees make smarter benefits choices by providing access to benefits plan summaries and premium cost calculators, unified benefits platforms also help HR teams automate many of their workflows. Since all employee compensation data and benefits enrollment information is stored and synchronized in one place, it makes enrolling new employees into benefits coverage, processing certain life events or changes throughout the year, and managing open enrollment periods much more accurate and efficient.
Navigate Regulatory Landscapes
Hiring employees from outside the state or country is a common strategy that many businesses are using to expand their talent pools. However, when hiring individuals from certain regions, they may have their own specific rules for benefits, reporting, and other HR requirements.
It’s essential not to make assumptions based on the format of each of these employees’ tax rules or benefits administration policies. Making legal mistakes in this area could lead to time-consuming, resource-intensive audits and financial penalties for the business.
Having a reputable and reliable benefits technology partner is crucial, as they can help ensure your benefits solutions are properly formatted to handle any applicable compliance functions the business may need to apply to employee benefits administration.
Depending on the type of business, this could mean managing different eligibility rules or automating certain reporting processes based on employee locations. By working with you to help build these checks into your system from day one, your technology partner can help you extract more value from your benefits platform while reducing the need for overly manual compliance checks.
Focus on Benefits Education
Business teams comprise a diverse group of individuals, each with unique interests and needs. In most cases, creating universal benefits education programs can be difficult if you’re trying to ensure everyone gets the maximum value from the coverage they receive. In such cases, a more effective strategy may be to create a customized benefits education program that is tailored to each employee’s individual priorities.
Best-of-breed benefits platforms make this possible by giving each employee their own personal benefits dashboard they can access whenever they need. This gives them quick access to all their benefits coverage information and lets them pull up helpful resources to make smarter coverage choices during open enrollment periods.
This kind of system also makes it easier for employees to submit changes to their dependents and any other personal details used for accurate benefits coverage without adding additional workload to HR teams.
Sync Business Data Across Multiple Systems
There’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with a set of tools that don’t talk to one another. When your benefits platform is isolated from your payroll software and insurance carriers, HR teams end up doing more hands-on work than necessary, as they repeatedly enter the same information across multiple systems.
By choosing a benefits administration platform that integrates with your other essential systems, you enable a more efficient and seamless flow of HR information. This can help simplify everything from onboarding a new hire to verifying that their salary deductions are calculated correctly.
Leverage a More Flexible Benefits Plan
Most companies take the time to research all their options for employee benefits and decide on a plan that helps balance all their needs. However, as teams grow to include a mix of both in-house and remote working employees, they may start to find that having a “one-size-fits-all” benefits program approach can be too rigid. In these cases, trying to create more personalized and flexible benefits plans can be pretty helpful.
For example, when adopting the right benefits technology, HR teams have greater system flexibility to set up multiple benefits plan tiers, establish different employee premium funding models, and create automated rules and policies based on the eligibility requirements of local or remote hires.
Having this extra flexibility allows the business to provide benefit formats that work and are valuable to all types of employees, while also helping to avoid the administrative chaos that can come with manually managing several different plans at once.
Use Advanced Security to Protect Employee Data
Distributed workforces typically rely more on digital tools and technology to support them day to day. While digital tools and solutions help all employees carry out their tasks more efficiently, this expanded digital footprint can also lead to data security risks. This can be especially concerning as sensitive employee data is passed between systems to handle payroll or benefits administration.
Ensuring you benefit from technology that is properly secured and adheres to all compliance regulations is critical not only to avoiding a data breach but also to maintaining the business’s reputation. Because of this, working with the right benefits technology partner is critical, as they’ll help to ensure your system is built with secure elements like data encryption and strict access controls.
Grow Your Business More Effectively
Having the right benefits technology in place is a crucial element for streamlining your HR-related processes and supporting employees’ needs. However, it’s essential that your solutions can scale in tandem with your business.
By investing in a best-of-breed BenAdmin platform and partnering with the right technology partners, you can ensure that you maximize your HR teams’ automation capabilities while creating a more flexible and functional benefits education program for your employees.
Author Bio: Frank Mengert
Frank Mengert continues to find success by spotting opportunities where others see nothing. As the founder and CEO of ebm, a leading provider of employee benefits solutions. Frank has built the business by bridging the gap between insurance and technology-driven solutions for brokers, consultants, carriers, and employers nationwide.
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