Streamline Your Open Enrollment 2024 Process
Open enrollment and the cost of healthcare
In 2021, the United States health expenditures amounted to $12,000 USD per capita. For comparison, in 1960, the per capita expenditures for health stood at $146 USD. That means Americans experience some of the highest health care costs in the world. For businesses tasked with issuing health insurance, that makes open enrollment a challenge.
During your open enrollment 2024, employees may want to know how to save money–more than ever before. Employees may have more questions about enrolling in a health plan, switching plans or re-enrolling in their current plan. Businesses may be tasked with providing additional details about health insurance benefits, insurance elections, benefits packages, lifestyle benefits and special enrollment periods.
Creating an open enrollment plan as a business owner
For businesses in the security and cleaning industries, providing open enrollment for employees requires careful planning and may be legally required. From a granular view, your open enrollment 2024 process may resemble the following steps:
- Develop and assemble benefits packets (forms, information, etc.)
- Create the benefit packages in your human resources software
- Communicate open enrollment details and deadlines
- Distribute specific packets and brochures to employees
- Collect completed forms by the deadline
- Manually enter data, which includes election or waiver information, dependent and beneficiary information in your human resources software
- Notify your benefits broker
- Maintain benefit updates for new and terminated employees
- Repeat the process
Streamlining your open enrollment 2024 process
Even though the above process may seem linear, that list of tasks may require a great deal of time and attention. However, it is possible to eliminate a few of those steps. Start by answering the following questions about your business:
- How do you manage employee benefits?
- Are there benefits to using paperless options for the enrollment process?
- Do you use an integrated workforce management system?
- Do you provide access to an employee self-service solution?
If you answered yes to these questions, then take advantage of the benefits available in your integrated workforce management system, such as a self-service portal, which lets employees know how to find and access healthcare information with ease.
From a back-office standpoint, notifications are another key feature to help ensure that you are streamlining your open enrollment 2024 process. Better communicate deadlines to employees by setting up banner alerts that will appear when your employee is accessing their self-service portal. Also take advantage of features that help you stay in compliance with required notices, while simplifying the open enrollment processes for your busy workforce.
Using TEAM Software by WorkWave during open enrollment
For TEAM Software by WorkWave users who wish to streamline their open enrollment process, start by using the MyInsurance Benefits and the Enrollment Wizards in eHub. By adding these features, your employees can easily view the benefits they’ve already elected, update dependent and beneficiary information and enroll in new or updated benefits as needed.
As the employee progresses through the wizard, the costs are displayed so they know right away what their investment is. Pair this with the benefits your employees already have in eHub such as viewing paychecks, schedules and tax information, and you’re set up for increased employee empowerment and engagement. And for those employees that need a little extra help, there’s an employee assistance feature so an admin can login and enroll on an employee’s behalf.
For companies with distributed workforces, these online features are critical to simplifying your process. You can eliminate staff time spent distributing and collecting the forms, as well as the manual updating of employee records, because benefit election and updated data automatically flow from eHub into WinTeam.
And the employee payroll deductions automatically flow into payroll. Benefit packages can be assigned based on employee type so you don’t have to worry about which packets go to which type of employee. You can also quickly see at a glance the completion status of each employee, making follow up an easy process.
Once the enrollment period ends, the information can be compiled for distribution to your benefits broker or carrier. And for larger companies, it’s possible for a service to create an automatic feed to send benefit information directly to your carrier.
More information on streamlining your open enrollment process
For more information on using an integrated workforce management system for your employee insurance benefits, reach out to a TEAM Software by WorkWave Account Manager. Set up a demo to learn how you can incorporate these features into your open enrollment 2024 processes.