Many organizations are in the midst of their open enrollment 2017 dates leading into January. With 2017 just around the corner, the planning and prep is finally culminating into a smooth transition into the new calendar year. It’s always a good idea to look to experts for the latest tips to take you into the new season.
Each year consists of carefully analyzing the viability of previous plans to include financial considerations, workforce usability studies and compliance changes coming down the pike. Employees are looking to HR to provide answers to their questions at their fingertips any time questions may pop up.
Communicating Open Enrollment 2017
Having a solid benefits communication strategy in place will help your employee population navigate their benefit plan options. Providing multiple avenues of communication helps to cover all the bases from employee information meetings to mailers to social media.
Ensuring key managers in your organization understand the baseline offerings will help as you disseminate your benefits messaging. Line managers can serve as additional resources for responding to questions on the job in a comfortable setting. Providing different avenues for obtaining information will help your employee population to make informed decisions about their benefits that will impact them and their dependents for the year to come.
Reaching employees that are busy with year-end tasks in their own jobs is important since this is the time that critical changes can be made to their many plan options. Do they want to drop or increase coverage of their benefits plans? Now is the time to make sure everyone who has been sailing along takes a moment to double check that what they had last year will still work for 2017. They must also be educated on voluntary benefits offerings that are either new to the organization or that may not have applied to their situation last year.
Easy Benefits Enrollment for All
Got your communication plan down pat? Great. Now the focus should be on ensuring that the benefits enrollment process for employees and benefits administrators is accurate and smooth. Cloud-based and mobile open enrollment human capital management systems make this happen. With benefits enrollment working seamlessly with other parts of your human capital management system, efficiency can be achieved without long hours and stress.
Today’s human capital management technology allows for HR to build open enrollment workflows with easy-to-use tools and forms. You can brand the experience so that employees see consistency whether mobile or on the desktop. Cloud technology allows for employees to go through the process of evaluating benefits plans at a time and place that is most convenient for them. This type of automated benefits administration is critical for today’s mobile workforce.
Automated enrollment provides additional perks such as knowing at any given time who has enrolled, who has started the process but hasn’t finished and who hasn’t touched it yet. Delivering targeted messages to employee populations that might need a hand can speed the process up.
Paper gets lost. Online, the data is immediately stored and is also being entered by the experts of that data—the employees themselves. Having employees enter their own information reduces data entry errors as well as the administrative burden on HR.
Reporting on usage, most popular options and where the most errors occur, will help to improve benefits offerings for next year as well as provide insight into where communication strategies can be adjusted for optimum results in benefits administration.
Benefits offerings are a key motivator to long-term employee engagement in your organization. With the proper planning, communication strategy and technologies in place, your benefits transition is bound to be smooth and enriching for your employee population and your benefits department.
Manage employee benefits plans and open enrollment for health and wellness, retirement, life, and disability. With EPAY Human Capital Management, you’ll never have to worry about entering information across disparate systems again. Get a live demonstration of our fully integrated human capital management system today.
