GeneralFrom Order-Taker to Strategic Partner: HR’s Evolution Through Better Tech

It can be difficult for your HR teams to focus on big-picture goals when they’re tied to a desk carrying out time-consuming admin tasks. Although it’s true that HR teams do need to carry out certain similar workflows from time to time, lower-priority items like answering emails or entering data into forms shouldn’t be where they spend most of their energy.

Transitioning to a more strategic, higher-value approach starts with improving the technology your business uses. With the right systems in place, HR teams can gain the freedom needed to focus more on the organization’s people and the data that helps to drive the business forward.

The HR Burden of Legacy Systems

Having too many manual-driven processes isn’t just an annoyance – it often leads to teams constantly being in a state of “playing catch-up.” When you rely on outdated, fragmented systems or databases, the risk of “human error” goes up. This can lead to payroll mistakes or benefits issues that take even more of your time to fix.

Over time, this administrative loop is a major cause of burnout for your teams. They often spend most of their day dealing with “firefighting” rather than focusing on what matters most – your teams and business culture development among the people in their organization.

Legacy systems that are isolated from one another

Elevating the Employee Experience

If employees constantly have to absorb a high volume of information when reviewing their benefits options or wait days for an answer about their coverage, their trust in the company’s support system drops.

Moving to a digital-first benefits administration approach helps your business in a few different ways:

• More Autonomy: Best-of-breed benefits platforms let employees access all of their benefits information whenever they need it. They can also make quick updates to their beneficiaries or check coverage limits without emailing HR teams.
• Self-Service Support: Integrated decision-support tools help your team compare plans with one another or calculate premiums ahead of open enrollment, allowing them to choose coverage amounts that fit their budget and health needs. This takes the stress out of enrollment and helps people feel more confident about their decisions.
• Less HR Fatigue: When information is clear and easy for employees to find, it naturally leads to fewer emails, fewer meetings, and increased productivity for everyone. All of this reduces fatigue and allows both HR and employees to focus on more critical issues.

Using Data as a Strategic Asset

Data management is an important responsibility of HR teams. Not only is the collection and security of data important, but it’s also essential for driving smarter decision-making.

Having the right benefits technology, to monitor things like benefits participation and claims patterns in real time. This visibility allows the business to spot rising costs or underused offerings early enough to fix them before they hurt the bottom line. It also ensures your benefits actually match what your employees are actively looking for.

With this information in hand, you’re able to carry out important initiatives such as:

• Tailoring Your Offerings: Design more flexible benefits packages, such as Section 125 plans, that better reflect the age, lifestyle, and unique needs of your “entire” workforce.
• Identify Coverage Gaps: Find areas where employees might be over-insured or where they need more support, like mental health or family planning.
• Justifying Business Spend: Provide leadership with concrete evidence of which programs are delivering the best return on investment.

Operational Efficiency and Compliance

Moving data between different systems manually can be a major source of frustration. If your benefits technology doesn’t “communicate” with your other systems, HR teams end up stuck in a cycle of double-entry, such as having to update payroll every time someone makes a change.

Syncing data between benefits platforms, carrier portals, and payroll providers creates a much more automated, secure, and accurate way to move forward. This removes the lag that often causes accounting issues and can be an important element of helping your business remain compliant with various compliance standards.

Keeping up with rules for COBRA, the ACA, and HIPAA is complicated on its own. However, best-of-breed platforms allow you to apply preconfigured rules that help standardize data management records while also enabling automated notifications to teams when a qualifying event occurs. This helps HR teams to avoid missing deadlines or unknowingly breaching compliance standards.

Invest in the Right HR Solutions

Modernizing your HR technology is critical to maximizing your business’s productivity while keeping your employees fully informed about their benefits.

By reducing administrative bottlenecks and using your data effectively, you’ll finally step away from reactive tasks and give your employees and HR teams the capacity to focus on higher-level priorities.

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.