Businesses today are no strangers to change. With both customer and employee expectations rapidly evolving each year, organizations are constantly needing to adapt their approach to the market as well as how they manage their operations internally.
A big part of this evolution has been the global embracing of remote and hybrid working models. But this hasn’t just impacted the number of people working in the office versus at home. It also requires significant adjustments for organizations in managing important elements such as payroll and benefits administration.
To support this shift, many organizations are now relying on scalable benefits technology that grows with their business and allows them to facilitate the needs of employees while also supporting their HR teams.
Below are some effective strategies you can apply to ensure your benefits tech supports your team’s growth, rather than hindering it.
Prioritize a Best-of-Breed BenAdmin Platform
For a distributed workforce, it’s important to ensure you have a system managing benefit enrollments and education that’s both easy-to-use and has all the tools and features that both your HR teams and employees require. Best-of-breed BenAdmin platforms achieve this by creating an on-demand, self-service solution where employees can view and manage their benefits coverage, while simplifying the movement of employee data to and from connected services.
While these solutions are great for helping employees to access helpful resources they can use, such as benefits coverage summaries and premium calculation tools, they also enable HR teams to automate many of their workflows as well. Since all payroll and benefits data is synced to the platform, it allows many HR workflows, such as new hire enrollment, qualifying life event changes, and open enrollment submissions to be streamlined, freeing up teams for more strategic initiatives.
Ensure Global and Local Compliance
If you decide to hire employees outside of the company’s operating state or country, there can be many new legal responsibilities to consider. Since each location could have its own benefits reporting requirements and other HR requirements, it’s important to ensure you have the right systems and processes in place to meet them.
This process shouldn’t be rushed, since getting any of these details wrong could lead to potential audits down the road or maybe even certain financial penalties. Having the right benefits technology in place and a partner you can trust to help you manage it will minimize the potential of missing any of these important cross-border HR requirements.
Working with a qualified technology partner will help you configure your benefits platform so it has the right compliance features. This could include managing varying eligibility rules or reporting needs, while also helping to reduce the risk of costly errors due to increased manual administration.
Offer a Highly Personalized Employee Experience
Most workforces are made up of a wide range of individuals who all may have different expectations of the business when it comes to support and training. Instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to important training initiatives such as benefits education, creating a more personalized experience on an individual basis is much more effective.
Modern benefits technology solutions provide employees with their own personalized dashboard they can use to manage all elements of their benefits coverage and enrollment processes. This includes the ability to access on-demand resources when deciding on coverage options, making sure every employee feels confident about the choices they make.
Embrace Seamless Integration
Very few things can be as frustrating to business teams as having multiple tools that don’t sync information to one another. If your benefits platform doesn’t communicate effectively with payroll systems or your insurance providers, it can create much more manual workloads, as you have to navigate between multiple platforms to enter the same information.
Having a BenAdmin platform with the ability to connect to other systems of record enables a much more automated flow of information and makes everything from onboarding to payroll deductions more manageable.
Utilize Flexible and Customizable Plan Design
When you hire a more diverse team of remote and hybrid employees, it’s important to remember that these individuals likely have their own unique needs. Having a one-size-fits-all benefits plan doesn’t always bring the same value to each of your employees. This is why building more flexible and customizable benefits plans can be so important.
By using a best-of-breed BenAdmin platform, you’ll be able to unlock this level of flexibility. It can allow HR teams to move away from overly rigid benefits plans and allow them to create a more customizable program.
With the right technology in place, HR teams can manage multiple plan tiers, define unique employee contribution strategies, and create automations built around variable eligibility rules. This provides the business and its employees with much more flexibility by offering customizable benefits, all without the additional administrative headache that often accompanies managing multiple plans simultaneously.
Choose Robust Security and Data Privacy
When you have a highly distributed team in your business, it’s important to consider the added risk that comes with needing to support highly digital operations. Since both employee and client data are regularly collected and used in the course of business with remote operations, it’s critical to ensure proper security precautions are being taken.
With a distributed team, your business is at a much greater risk of experiencing security breaches because of the increased number of endpoints connecting to business systems and resources. If one of these breaches occurs, it can create significant issues from a compliance standpoint and impact the trust that employees have in the business.
This is why your benefits platform should contain various security features such as data encryption and strict access controls. You may also need to ensure they comply with global privacy laws like GDPR or other regulatory standards based on where your employees live.
Help Your Business Scale Effectively
When you have the right benefits technology in your organization, it can help you to better support and grow your distributed workforce. Not only will it help you attract and keep great people by offering flexible and personalized benefits options, but it will also help you free up your HR team to focus on more strategic objectives.
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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