Tips For Improving Benefits Administration
Open enrollment periods, new programs, and changing regulations are just some of the headaches HR faces. To streamline the way you manage company benefits, follow these tips:
- Go paperless to make the process more efficient
- Create an online system that allows employees to enroll and understand their benefits remotely
- Establish a clear benefits communication strategy
- Encourage employees to speak out when they are not happy with something and to make suggestions
- Consider adding non-traditional benefits, such as remote work opportunities, unlimited vacation days, and sabbaticals
Every company is unique, and every HR team is in a different place. Take an honest look at how the current system is working and where improvements can be made.
Create A Competitive Employee Benefits Programme
First things first, you’ll need to decide on the employee benefits you want to offer. Some of the most common ones include:
- Health, dental and vision insurance
- Pension plans and/or retirement planning
- Life insurance coverage
- Personal time off
- Remote work and/or flexible work programmes
Many companies offer additional benefits in order to give back to their workers and make themselves more attractive places to work . These benefits include:
- Transportation-related benefits
- Home or pet insurance
You’ll need to consider which benefits are the most aligned with your company’s situation and your employees needs. At Perkbox, we help create a customised employee benefits programme based on your needs.
Ways Human Resource Management Benefits Small Businesses
Its important not to underestimate the impact of HR on your business. While you might think that you can handle things internally, outsourcing your HR offers a multitude of benefits. Partnering with an HRM expert can help you secure top talent, create a stronger onboarding process, improve employee retention, elevate employee benefits, deal with fewer compliance issues, access HR remotely and save valuable time and energy.
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Tips On Improving Employee Benefits Management
The right HR software can make all the difference when managing employee benefits.
Arcoros Benefits Management software is a cloud-based module that automates critical workflows to improve processes for both HR administrators and the employee population they manage. Its built-in integration with over 300 partners creates an established connection to internal and external applications including sending data to insurance carriers, payroll providers, brokers, ERP systems HCM platforms and more.
With this HR automated solution, you can enhance communication and transparency company-wide. You can also navigate compliance, secure, manage and transfer high-compliance data from internal and external systems, including sending data to insurance carriers, payroll providers, ERP systems and more.
Contact us to see how it can simplify your benefits administration process.
Managing Employee Benefits Can Take A Lot Of Time And Energy But Numerous Software Options Can Help You With Employee Benefits Management
Comprehensive benefit plans can improve your business, demonstrating to existing staff that you value them and enticing prospective employees to join your team. Creating a suite of employee benefits can be a huge undertaking, so having a benefits administrator and human resources software to handle employee benefits management is vital. Below is a guide to benefits administration, how it fits into a company, and some of the best employee benefits management software.
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Manage Your Benefits Program Effectively
Before administering your benefits plan, set an efficient process in place. Determine how tasks like onboarding employees, giving benefits training and tracking benefit usage will be completed to help you better manage the benefits administration process. Use tools like HR software to track benefits and employee information. Build a detailed onboarding and enrollment process each employee must follow when they start at the company.
Related: Setting Up Employee Benefit Packages: A Guide for Managers
Manage Employee Benefits With Employ Ai And Data Analytics
AI and data analytics can help your HR department make sense of diversity whether your company is large or small, allowing you to better manage your employee benefits.
Several key factors can map your employees’ benefits needs. Analyze the complexity of your current benefits plan’s offerings and the rate of employee participation. Additionally, determine the computer literacy of your employees and their preferences for receiving communications . Once you have confirmed this information, ensure that your company is up-to-date with any employee benefits labor laws, such as COBRA. For example, Arizona has Mini-COBRA that goes above and beyond federal COBRA as a part of your benefits administration. These insights will help you alter your employee benefits plan to best serve your employees.
Once you have your employees’ benefits needs all figured out, you can more easily determine which benefits your company can afford to offer now, and over the course of the next few years. You will then be well prepared to discuss the benefits technologies that would best fit your company, including cloud-based ACA compliance solutions for your qualifying workforce.
During your research, keep track of other available plans so that you can also find outside resources to help your employees make better decisions about benefits that your company doesn’t offer.
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What Is Employee Performance Management
The performance management process is essentially continuous rather than an annual review. The goal of performance management focuses on building your employees’ ability to perform their work better. Skills improvement and professional development are both essential parts of performance management.
However, performance management is also a two-way street. You need to gauge whether an employee is a fit for their job and whether the job utilizes the employee’s skill set to its fullest. In other words, it involves aligning one’s job assignments and skills with the goals of the employee’s team and organization.
Tips For Managing Employee Benefit Costs
As inflation increases the price of many goods and services, including health care, employers and employees are struggling to stretch their budgets. Most workers expect their employer to provide health benefits. And businesses want to offer the most affordable health plans possible. But theyre unsure how to best use the companys employee benefits dollars. Review these four tips for managing employee benefit costs.
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Get Proactive With Errors
No matter how accurately you do things, sometimes errors are bound to happen. While compliance is necessary for any payroll, sometimes you get errors in reminders, calendars, checklists, and other areas. If your company gets summoned by the tax authorities of any mistake or delay, address the issue immediately and avoid the blame games. Failing to rectify that error in due time might cost you hefty business fines and other inconveniences that could get avoided if such mistakes get owed on time. You can create policies in your company for everyone to be proactive and ready to cooperate when such incidences happen. The same should apply to payrolls and issues dealing with employees.
Pension And Retirement Plans
Pension and retirement plans are employee benefits that help employees save for retirement. There are two types of retirement plans: defined benefit and defined contribution.
Defined benefit plans provide a source of income for retirees that is typically based on their years of service and salary history. This income is paid out in regular monthly payments. Defined contribution plans, on the other hand, allow employees to contribute a set amount of money to their retirement account each month. The employer may also make contributions to the employees account.
There are several different types of retirement plans, including 401 plans, 403 plans, 457 plans and pension plans. Each type of plan has different rules and regulations regarding employee eligibility, employee contributions and employer contributions.
401 plans are the most common type of retirement plan offered by employers. Under a 401 plan, employees can contribute a percentage of their salary to their retirement account each month. Employers may also make matching or discretionary contributions to employee accounts.
403 plans are similar to 401 plans, but they are available to employees of public schools and certain nonprofit organizations. Under a 403 plan, employees can contribute a percentage of their salary to their retirement account each month. Employers may also make matching or discretionary contributions to employee accounts.
Pension
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Best Google Sheets Add
While Google sheets are a comprehensive package in itself, you can combine them with several tools to enhance its functionality. Some of the useful tools the HRs can use along with Google sheets for employee management are mentioned below-
Sheetgo is a powerful tool with outstanding features that help HR perform an array of tasks. By adding this to the spreadsheets, an HR can consolidate, append, filter, and distribute the data. It can help employees track hours, and employers can track their expenses. It also provides additional ready-to-use templates for the HRs to use.
TimeOwl is an amazing time-tracking app for organisations. It uses Google Calendar for tracking the working hours and days of the employees and thus can be integrated into Google sheets. It is easy to set up and use and makes tracking time even easier for employee management. They can share the data of time tracked with anyone, and generate payrolls based on that.
- LinkedIn Prospector
This app is highly effective for the hiring and recruiting processes carried out by HRs. It helps you search for the most relevant LinkedIn profiles and store them as a database in Google sheets. This eliminates the extra energy and time wasted by HR in manually searching the candidates.
- Employee Onboarding App
Allows To Measure Progress Effectively
Many objectives can fall flat on their face or end up failing due to a lack of monitoring and measuring. With Objective Key Results in place, it can significantly boost the chances of that objective being met.
OKRs are a great way to achieve more for your business and to provide your employees with well-structured personal goals for their career progression. With the right OKRs in place, it can result in much success for the individual, the team involved, or the organization as a whole.
Introduce this methodology of setting goals for your business, and you will likely see some excellent growth within the organization going forward.
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The Extras: Food Fitness And Housing Allowances
The rise of the tech industry has meant the proliferation of new work perks, which companies like Google and Facebook have made famous. Snacks, meals at meetings, fitness center memberships, childcare provisions, housing allowances, and the ability to work from home are all possibilities.
Sit down and calculate these costs to see what you spend in each category. For example, you might take a small pay cut to work from home if you can save money on gas, tolls, and wear and tear on your car.
Improve The Efficiency Of Your Recruitment Process
Your HR department can always improve the companys culture and that also includes the newcomers that join the business. Improving the efficiency and delivery of your recruitment process is important to get the best hires.
The KRs used could be:
- Develop the best careers pages for prospective hires.
- Improve the hiring process based on feedback from candidates.
- Utilize software for managing recruitment effectively.
Improving employee retention is key for any business nowadays. If youre not hiring the most suitable candidates for the role, chances are youll be re-hiring sooner than youd hoped. When you better the recruitment process, youll find you attract the best talent.
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Why Do Employers Offer Benefits To Employees
Benefit packages take a lot of time out of many HR professionals time. And with good reason: theyre one of the most basic employee engagement and retention strategies, and they support talent attraction as well.
The numbers speak for themselves about the importance of employee benefits. Extensive research by the Society of Human Resource Management indicates that 92% of employees consider employment benefits as important for their overall job satisfaction . Almost one third of employees also cited work benefits as the top reason of looking for a job outside their organization and for choosing to stay at their job, too.
Benefits are also among the top driving factors candidates look for in job ads 63% of job seekers surveyed say they pay attention to what benefits a company offers. This means that offering benefits, and mentioning them in your job ads and careers page, is a great part of your employer branding efforts.
Employee benefits also help you take care of high-performing employees without the need to keep investing in exceptionally high pay raises. All employees should get paid enough to pay the bills and live comfortably, but they might accept less pay if they have strong health insurance, flexible hours and other benefits important to them. The practice of employees giving up a part of their salary for benefits is called salary packaging, and may also result in tax deductions or other gains for either party.
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Pick The Benefits You Want To Offer
Employees value benefits that offer them and their families flexibility and support. Today, the most popular benefits packages are a combination of traditional and voluntary benefits. Voluntary benefits are offered by employers, but are mostly paid for by the employee. Most companies provide health care, dental and vision insurance, but some of the more popular alternative inclusions are student loan assistance and financial wellness planning.
FYI: It is critical to create a benefits package that appeals to employees. The best plans combine robust benefit offerings for a low cost. While offering great benefits is valuable, that value loses steam if employees pay high out-of-pocket costs to access their benefits.
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Benefits Of Measuring And Managing Employee Performance
Management expert Peter Drucker once famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” In an age where employers look at performance as more than the revenue their employees bring into the company, this saying is still relevant.
Why should your company measure employee performance in the first place? One recent study published by Capgemini argues that employee performance, including productivity and engagement, is closely linked to the employee experience. In other words, high-performing employees and teams work in a high-performance workplace and vice-versa.
Implementing an employee performance management system will benefit your organization in the following ways:
Establish A Culture Of Fair Recognition
Using employee performance reviews, you can establish a culture of fair recognition in your organization. On the one hand, by identifying top performers and rewarding them, you show your workforce that you appreciate and recognize hard work. It is crucial to do this, as employee recognition is the number one factor driving employee engagement and productivity.
On the other hand, an employee lacking in his performance will need closer management. Identifying weak performers on time is important so you can set up a development plan to improve their skills and reduce errors.
If that does not work, you need to decide and communicate the consequences to the workforce to get their act together accordingly. Missing either one of these can have a severe impact on your business.
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How To Manage Employee Benefits
Human Resources,Benefits,Manager
As if navigating insurance packages for a workforce that spans four generations weren’t complicated enough, the current COVID-19 pandemic is causing employees to re-think their benefits priorities. Benefits that would have attracted the workforce pre-COVID-19, now pale in comparison to flexible scheduling and the ability to work from home. Learning how to properly manage your employee benefits is more important than ever.
As employee needs continue to change, it’s important for HR to have a deep understanding of employees’ unique situations in order to best customize and manage their employee benefits. Cloud-based benefits administration is needed now more than ever when navigating the changing landscape.
Analyze And Ask For Feedback
Administrators should check in with their employees regularly to see how their benefits are serving them. They should make sure that the benefits are easy to use and that they provide the coverage promised. Between these conversations, and internal analytics from employee benefits management software, administrators can identify patterns and glean insights on how to improve plans for the following year.
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So What Are Good Benefits For Employees
Or rather, what employee benefits do people value the most? The easy answer is that employees value all benefits. But, budgets are limited and companies need to find the benefits mix that will have the most positive impact, while also not breaking the bank.
To do this, first be sure to learn what benefits you need to offer by law. This could be national or state law. Make a list and decide if you can extend some of those benefits. For example, in France, employees are guaranteed three to five days of bereavement leave. You could decide to extend this leave if you find that your employees need it.
Then, take a look at surveys to help you determine voluntary benefits your company should offer. Glassdoors Benefits Review survey in the US investigated the correlation between certain benefits and job satisfaction. A correlation of 1 means the benefit is a good predictor of employee satisfaction, while 0 shows no correlation. Heres the list of employee benefits with correlations of more than 0.5:
Another recent survey by a benefits provider identifies the three most popular non-insurance benefits:
You can also look at employee benefits examples from big companies with high employee ratings. You may not be able to afford all these benefits, but they can certainly give you ideas.
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