Gearing Up For Open Enrollment

With the year coming to a close your thoughts might be turning to your company’s upcoming open enrollment. Every year employers hand out a stack of daunting paperwork to their employees and wait to see how many of those forms actually get turned back in. Chances are not many people have time to thumb through all the paperwork, and even more of those people don’t quite understand all of it anyway. On top of that, do you really want all of that paperwork on your desk? My guess is no. So, how can we get through open enrollment in a more civilized (and organized) fashion? Cue technology.

Hello Benefits Administration Software

Remember in Elementary school when you were learning your basic mathematics? Think about how difficult and time-consuming it was for you to sit there and do multiple, subtraction, addition, etc, by hand. Thankfully the older we got the more we could use calculators to handle our math problems. Benefits admin software is that ‘calculator’ that simplifies your problems and allows you to add in a great deal of efficiency. If you had the option between doing math by hand or using a calculator which would you choose? Exactly. Choosing a benefits administration software means you get to ditch the piles of paper and present employees with benefit selections through an easy workflow. This will walk them through their options step-by-step and even provide additional information where it is needed. 

Let’s Get Acquainted 

Well hello benefits admin software, you want to help me with my open enrollment? Perfect - let’s get going. First step is to add in all your carrier information and set up your health plans. Of course with this you’ll need to do things such as add in time parameters for your employees among other things. You can add as many benefits, carriers, and plans as you need. If you want to offer additional notes to your employees about certain plans, you can attach plan documents where needed. Once all the information is in there you can pass the torch to your employees and let them do the rest. If your employees can access their employee self service (ESS) portal, they can access their benefit options (spoiler alert: benefits are in the ESS portal). Once logged in they can browse and compare plans and make their selections accordingly. Seriously, it’s that easy.

Submit Selections and Relax

Depending on if your software has carrier connections or not, this step may be omitted. Let’s assume your software doesn’t have carriers, or maybe it does, but you don’t utilize that feature; you’ll simply need to grab the report of employee's specific selections and submit that to the insurance carrier(s) to step up. If you have carrier connections, this will be done automatically once the open enrollment period ends. 

If you’re interested in a demo of our benefits administration software you can watch one below.