It is said that “the medium is the message” and that expression certainly holds true with respect to online benefits administration. No longer are providers merely supplying tools. Now it’s all about the “employee experience.”
In less than a decade, benefit administration solutions have evolved from a means to perform day-to-day functions to strategic portals for sharing information and helping employees make better decisions. The provider’s client has, in effect, shifted from employer to employee. The focus is no longer on simply offering transactional assistance but on providing user-friendly, accessible, self-help guidance to the workforce, which in turn pays off for the organization.
In the 1990s, companies that outsourced administration were looking to do hand over the “paperwork” to someone else. Call centres were developed to answer employees’ questions quickly and accurately—a big timesaver for in-house human resources departments.
Then, at the beginning of this decade, providers began looking at Web tools for HR applications and online benefits enrolment was born. For employees, this meant that they visited a site once a year to make their benefit choices, based mostly on the information in handbooks or shared at in-person sessions.
However, once the door to the Internet was open, no one was content with the status quo. Employers wanted to have employee portals available year-round and share information that would help to create a workforce of better benefits consumers. Employees, who were becoming increasingly familiar in their personal lives with online tools and how robust they could be, were keen to enjoy a similar experience with respect in the workplace, with the ability to access the information they needed, whenever they needed it. And providers saw an opportunity to create tools that were more useful to both employer and employees.
It was at this point that benefits administration made the leap from information-puller to information-pusher. Now we see employee Web sites, accessible via the corporate intranet site, that offer features such as the following:
• Information about the company’s benefit program. For some employers, this means that they have gone completely paperless and no longer provide a benefits booklet. For others, the highlights of the plan appear online for easy reference, while printed material is still available for greater detail.
• Online enrolment sites that link to additional sources of information. The latest offer is “single sign-on”: by logging on once with their user name and password, employees can access their personal information on other providers’ sites. For example, they can link to their insurance provider’s site, see their claims history for the last year, and determine more accurately whether they need various types of coverage and how much.
• Modeling tools. Having online modelers conveniently available as employees make online decisions can help them to better understand the link, for example, between retirement savings and retirement income adequacy.
• Real-life scenarios. While not quite providing advice, new tools can be used to suggest an appropriate course of action. For instance, employees are able to enter personal information (age, gender, marital status, etc.) as well as information about their dependents and then have a “case study” pop up on the screen. They’ll see the choices made by a fictional person who shares their own characteristics and read about why he or she selected various options. These scenarios can be extremely useful in helping employees make smart decisions.
• Total rewards context. By putting a price tag on benefits and including them as part of an employee’s overall compensation package, workers have an increased appreciation of what these benefits are worth. Organizations that are fully utilizing their employee benefit sites are beginning to move from paper to posting total reward statements online as well.
As workers become more technology-savvy and—especially in the case of younger employees—develop a preference for online communication and tools, benefits administration is moving with the times to meet their needs. At the same time, the advantages for employers of online benefits administration have progressed from merely tracking employees’ choices to helping to shape them. While the evolution has been remarkable over the last few years, there is much more to come as employers aim to further enhance the employee experience.
Sarah Beech is Managing Principal, Consulting for Hewitt Associates in Canada.
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