The Heat is On in HR: Open Enrollment Approaches…

Just when we are getting some relief from many days of record breaking, triple digit temperatures, you look at the calendar and realize that open enrollment is only a few months away.  For many HR departments, the thought of all that paper, employee meetings and changes to all the benefits causes their temperatures to rise.

Not only do premiums seem to skyrocket each year, but then there are the problems communicating the cost increases, any added benefits or dropped benefits, and also, there is the paper flow…or is that overflow? Documentation on each benefit needs to be copied and provided to each employee, as well as the forms that have to be completed. Many times this paperwork gets misplaced, and then has to be provided multiple times to the same employee.  Deadlines are tight, and all forms have to be reviewed for accuracy and completeness before being handed back to each of the providers.

Benefit Enrollment and Benefit Messenger – It’s Time to Take Some of the Heat off Your HR Department!

Benefit Enrollment
Sage HRMS has online Benefit Enrollment that is part of Employee Self Service.  It can use your plans that are already established in Sage HRMS, plus it provides attaching links to plan documentation and forms that the employee can print or download. HR can review employee choices, and once open enrollment is closed, changes elected by the employees can be sent into the Sage HRMS software without being manually entered.

While there will still be employee meetings to hold and questions to answer, this additional module available for Sage HRMS can take care of some of the administrative heat during open enrollment.  In order to find relief during your late fall or winter open enrollment, however, now is the time to work through getting Benefit Enrollment installed, set up, and tested with a mock open enrollment.  Plan for a good three months of setup and testing – remember, there is already more than 40 hours of work to do every week before implementing Benefit Enrollment.

Once you’ve made it through the successful implementation and ready to go live, an additional advantage to the Benefit Enrollment module is that it can be used for Life Event benefit changes as well as onboarding new employees into the benefits. That means some relief from the heat of day-to-day benefit changes that are provided by the Benefit Enrollment module.

Benefits Messenger
Once this relief is in sight, there is one additional module to Sage HRMS that can help: Benefits Messenger. Benefits Messenger has the ability to upload changes in employee benefits from Sage HRMS to your carriers. No filling out forms or creating your own files to upload. Benefits Messenger can send demographic changes as well as enrollment changes to your carrier.

Learn More: Visit our upcoming Sage HRMS Webinar Series which includes an upcoming webinar (July 31) on Benefits Management Process – Moving Toward Paperless