VertiSource specializes in HR, payroll, accounting outsourcing, and other services. Our team of fully trained, hard-working professionals can handle a long list of outsourced tasks, from time and attendance to payroll services and worker’s compensation claims. Even benefits administration is on the table. We mention this because benefits administration is a sore spot for a lot of companies.
Benefits are an unavoidable part of doing business. But compared to many of the other things companies need to deal with, administering benefits programs is exceptionally complicated and time-consuming. HR departments can easily find themselves putting a lot of effort into benefits administration at the expense of other necessary tasks.
If you find your company in this position, you are not alone. Here are five benefits administration tasks your HR team could outsource:
1. Designing Benefits Packages
Designing a benefits package is essentially putting together the benefits that will be made available during the next program year. It requires a ton of research. It requires comparing different products to find the most value. Designing a good package even requires looking into voluntary benefits and whether certain options appeal to the workforce. Benefits package design is no easy task, that’s for sure.
2. Open Enrollment
Certain benefits, like health insurance and retirement plans, are subject to specific enrollment periods. As a result, in-house benefits administration requires facilitating open enrollment near the end of the current program year. Generally, this means anywhere from late October to the end of December for most companies.
Open enrollment can be chaotic. Questions need to be answered. Paperwork needs to be completed and submitted. All along the way, employees need a lot of help to get things done. Wouldn’t it be nice to leave open enrollment to someone else?
3. Employee Education
A big part of open enrollment is educating employees about the benefits they are entitled to. Without sufficient knowledge, employees are left guessing about their options. They may find out too late that they did not make the best choices during open enrollment. As an employer, you want to avoid that sort of thing. That means educating employees in advance of open enrollment.
4. Managing Benefits Administration Programs
While open enrollment might be the most chaotic time of the year for benefits administrators, there really is no downtime. Benefit programs must be managed the rest of the year. Proper management often means communicating with vendors and carriers. It means staying abreast of paperwork. It even means making certain members of the team available to employees who may need to reach out with questions or requests for help.
5. Maintaining Legal Compliance is Part of the Benefits Administration
Even if a company manages to handle the previous four tasks without much issue, this last one tends to be difficult for even the most seasoned administrators: maintaining legal compliance. Just complying with health insurance regulations alone can be a full-time job in and of itself.
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), employers have been saddled with additional responsibilities. There is more paperwork to complete. There are more reports to document. Employers have more responsibilities insofar as making sure they provide adequate health insurance options offering at least minimum essential coverage. Fail on a single point and a company could face fines and other legal consequences.
Benefits administration is no walk in the park. It is the bane of existence for many small- and mid-sized companies without adequate resources to hire and maintain a staff dedicated exclusively to it. Thankfully, outsourcing HR functions is a workable solution. Vertisource offers benefits administration along with many other HR services. Reach out to learn more about them.
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