Online Benefits Enrollment, Payroll HR Management – Northbrook, IL
July 25, 2023 | Mark Gurda
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Our three pronged approach to help your employers make great choices this year with their benefits!
According to a SHRM* survey, only a third of employees really understand their health coverage options, and even worse, only 10% of employees really feel good about the choices they make when selecting benefits. As the 2024 Open Enrollment period is about to begin, employers can use these pointers to help employees make smart decisions with their health benefits.
1. Communication early, communicate often!
- Notify employees of the annual open enrollment period, and send reminders, well ahead of time.
- Provide employees with a checklist to help facilitate wise benefit decision making.
- Communicate your open enrollment materials through emails, intranet, and meetings (in person or zoom) to inform employees of these important changes to last year’s coverage:
- Any new benefit offerings
- Changes to prior coverage
- Changes in premiums
- Assign a point of contact to answer questions. Make sure employees know they can ask questions.
- Begin and monitor sign-up –
- Make sure employees know they can’t make changes without a life event once open enrollment is closed.
2. Educate thoroughly with relevant benefit materials and modern enrollment tools.
Your enrollment materials should include:
- Plan summaries
- Plan rates
- Highlight any plan changes and rates
- Include any open enrollment booklets and forms
- If pamphlets or brochures are provided by your carrier or third-party administrator, deliver them to employees.
- Benefit Technology. Now is a good time to consider online enrollment programs and software if you haven’t already. Many of the digital benefit programs available are well worth it. They not only save you time and money in the enrollment and benefit management process, but also provide valuable decision-making tools for your employees, helping them to make the best decisions for their needs.
3. Perform benefit surveys.
If you haven’t done so for this year’s enrollment, make sure to survey employees a few months ahead of next year’s enrollment. Find out what your employees would like have added to the benefit offerings and any improvements they would like to see. Customize your offerings to your employee population after analyzing survey results.
To request a demo or for more information on CastleHR Technology and Castle Group Health (HealthInsure.com), contact:
Mark Gurda
President
Castle Group Health (HealthInsure.com) & CastleHR
www.healthinsure.com
www.castlehr.com
Tel: 847-559-8100
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CastleHR provides you with expert benefit services through HealthInsure.com. For more than 25 years, HealthInsure.com has been empowering businesses and their employees to make wise decisions about their health coverage through FREE support and expert advise.
HealthInsure.com offers the following benefit services:
- Customized Group Plans
- Healthcare Budget Consulting
- Employee Wellness Plans
- Plan Administration & Compliance
- Human Resources Services
HealthInsure.com offers the following group benefit plans:
- Group Health
- Group Life & Disability
- Group Dental & Vision
- Voluntary Benefits
- Key Person Benefits
- Simplify the tedious tasks associated with your benefit programs
Employers juggle a lot of tasks at once. As a business client of CastleHR.com, we provide you with state-of-the-art resources and technology, along with live expert HR assistance to help you keep up with timely, and sometimes complex, state and federal regulations. These integrated services will help create greater efficiencies and enhance compliance, and are designed to let you focus on running your business.
Compliance Support
- COBRA - enrollment, filings and employee communication
- HIPAA - PHI compliance
- ERISA - wraps, filings, SMM, SAR, notices
- FMLA - leave requests, return to work requests, etc.
Administration Support
- Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)
- Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs)
- Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)
- Self-Funded Plans
- Premium Only Plans (POPs)
- Avoid costly penalties with expert compliance support
Ease reduces the burden of ACA compliance by automatically and continuously monitoring and reporting your company’s compliance risks.
- Tracking capabilities notifies employers of participation/reporting requirements based on enrollment.
- Measures affordability and ACA essential coverage standards.
- Generates ready to go reporting forms.
- Timely reminders from ease and your broker on ACA reporting deadlines.
- At little or no cost, expand your coverage by adding additional voluntary benefits
With an interface to several top-rated carriers and partners, Ease makes it easy for you enhance your benefit offering, without adding costs to your bottom line.
- The interface feature allows you to add voluntary benefit plans from top-rated carriers like Mutual of Omaha, Metlife, Aflac and more to your total benefit offering..
- Enrollments and any changes, adds, and terminations will be sent to carrier thru Ease.
- The consolidated billing feature allows managers to see all of their invoices across all products with one total premium.
- Add telemedicine, HRAs, HSAs, FSAs.
- Adding highly desired benefits such as Accident, Critical Illness, Disability, and Life Insurance, as well as telemedicine, HRAs, HSAs, FSAs, creates a financial safety net for your employees, giving them piece of mind and consequently boosts your morale and productivity.
- Integrate benefits and payroll data
Ease automates your payroll functions, eliminating the need to re-enter employee information for payroll during the hiring and onboarding process.
- Integrate Ease with several popular payroll providers such as ADP, Paylocity, and more.
- Only make changes once and have the information sync across systems.
- Any payroll provider can be added with Ease’s payroll API.
- When an employee enrolls in a plan or has a benefit adjustment, they can see the difference in cost per pay period instantly, and the change flows to the employee’s payroll provider.
- Eliminates paper pay stubs; employees can view paychecks and related information in Ease on mobile app.
- Onboard new employees without mounds of paperwork
Ease offers a smooth, comprehensive onboarding process that is essential for getting new hires up to speed fast.
- Administrators enter a few key elements and employees complete their profile in Ease before they start.
- HR creates and sends customized or template documents for the onboarding process such as Offer Letter, Benefit Options, Employee Handbook, Digital W-4s, I-9s and Direct Deposit setup, policy & document acknowledgement.
- HR can then track, in real time, and review specific policy documents and provided signature acknowledgements.
- Onboarding then syncs with benefits, payroll integrations, HRIS, and ACA compliance.
- Online Enrollment
Ease eliminates the need for the old paper-based benefit enrollment method, saving you time and money, and greatly reducing room for errors.
- Import employees directly from excel or manually enter.
- Tracts real-time open enrollment progress, including new hires.
- Identifies benefit eligibility presents employees with comparison options and costs per pay
- Utilize communication tools to notify employees of deadlines and other important information.
- Information is mapped during enrollment to submit directly to carriers.
- Custom reporting for billing reconciliation, payroll, & deductions.
- Analyze demographics, work census, enrollment summaries, beneficiaries, and more.
- HRIS 360 Degree View Of Your HR
Ease gives you a central location to manage benefits, payroll, compliance, view company statistics such as employee growth, company diversity, and organization charts and more.
- Manage complex PTO policies, employer and employee can track vacation, sick leave and more.
- Ease iOS & Android Mobile App allows access from anywhere, at any time.
- Manage employee performance with custom performance reviews and performance review templates.
- Maintain accurate company directory with employee events, birthdays, work anniversaries and more.
- Communication goes two ways to engage employees, conduct survey feedback and much more.