For many HR professionals, guiding employees through the Open Enrollment (OE) process can be an extremely time-consuming and stressful period. You have to navigate the Affordable Care Act (ACA) compliance; combine and transfer data from HR, payroll and benefits; organize dizzying amounts of communications and meetings with staff, and make sure that all eligible employees have made their selections and are enrolled in them on time. Whether you have a small or large team of HR professionals, the OE process can be streamlined with the help of enlisting the expertise of benefits brokers to help you navigate the uncertainties of OE. So, to better prepare for next season, here are a few ways a benefits broker can help enhance your process.

Getting Ahead of Open Enrollment with Early Discussions

Benefits brokers are great resources to use during OE because they can help you answer questions quicker more pertained towards analyzing vast business objectives and goals that can help you enhance your OE process for your employer, HR staff and the employees you oversee.

With the help of a benefits broker, you can define exactly what areas and resources of your business will need to be overhauled to streamline the total OE experience. Those may include areas in:

  • Technology
  • Change management
  • Process improvement
  • Services provided
  • Support administered

When working with benefits brokers, you can expect mass improvement to your overall OE process because their approach will be driven by research and analytics; they will have a strong network of connection and optimized support and will be able to offer you a variety of HR automated tools to help you enhance key workflows within your process.

Offering HR Automated Solutions to Navigate Open Enrollment Compliance

With the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as confusing as ever to navigate, it’s no secret that a large benefit of acquiring the services of benefits brokers include their ability to help you understand federal and state-level compliance laws so your employer doesn’t incur any penalties and fines come reporting season.

With ACA reporting, compliance demands that data be siphoned from Payroll, Time and Attendance and Benefits Administration. If you’re recording and transferring this data manually, or with technology that’s limited in capability, or with unconnected, single systems employed; managing the process is timely and hard to do.

An experienced benefits broker will support their various benefit offerings with connected, cloud-based HR automated solutions to support Benefits Management, Managing timesheets and PTO, Administering Payroll and other processes in HR Management and Talent Management.

They will be able to easily relay to their clients the benefits of how integrated HR systems can increase the security, management and mobility of their high-compliance data. That the technology will create less administrative output on all HR personnel, so they can spend more time focusing on more strategic objectives and employee engagement.

Guiding Clients with Accessibility

As more-and-more benefits brokers add HR automated tools with their benefit offerings, they are quickly becoming experts in all things human capital management (HCM). With the relationships between employer and benefits brokers becoming more symbiotic, due to emerging technologies and the need for experts to navigate a complex OE landscape; many innovative HR technology companies are offering technology to let brokers be more involved as their clients demand the extra support.

If permission is granted by the client, vendors of the technology can grant access to brokers to see their clients’ data to help them with their decision-making on their various HR-related processes, especially the Benefits Management portion of it.

This accessibility gives brokers the ability to run various processes for their clients as well if that’s how involved they and their clients’ want them to be. For example, they can help with communication efforts to employees on OE, run census reports, help with marketing and more.

The Cloud-Based Arcoro HCM Platform: The Open Enrollment Solution

Enhancing communication and transparency through the organization, keeping within ACA compliance, and handling the transfer of employee voluntary selections to appropriate carriers during OE are all various demands of Benefits Management technology that employers are in search of most.

benefits brokers

The Arcoro Benefits Management module automates critical workflows to improve processes for both HR administrators and the employee population they manage. Its built-in integration with over 300 partners creates an established connection to internal and external applications including to insurance carriers, payroll providers, brokers, ERP systems HCM platforms and more. This allows employers to secure, manage and transfer high-compliance data with ease.

Aside from a powerful, cloud-based Benefits Management module, Arcoro features the following modules within the full platform:

  • Core HR
  • ACA Compliance
  • Time and Attendance
  • Payroll Processing
  • Applicant Tracking System
  • Onboarding
  • Performance Management
  • Learning Management
  • Succession Planning

Contact Arcoro today if you are interested in learning more about Benefits Management, the full platform or if you would like to any of the modules in action.

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