Ascentis Blog

Information to help HR and payroll managers, recruiters, and compliance officers become more effective.

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Category Archives: open enrollment

The Secret to Easy Enrollment and a Paperless Process

How can HR managers use open enrollment to achieve greater employee satisfaction, while saving time and reducing errors? By going paperless and taking open enrollment online.

 

How does web-based/online paperless enrollment work?

 

With online open enrollment, HR publishes benefits content through the Web or company Intranet instead of creating, assembling and distributing a packet of information and forms. This significantly reduces the time and resource burden on HR.

 

Using an employee self-service (ESS) portal, employees can begin their open enrollment at any time. Information entered once can be used to automatically populate all enrollment forms, streamlining data entry to a single point and eliminating errors associated with messy handwriting. Required fields ensure that each enrollment form is completed before submission, while customized ESS screens only display eligible benefits. Employees can start and stop their enrollment session as needed and, since the ESS portal is available 24/7, enrollment can be completed during non-work hours.

 

When the open enrollment period ends, the data can transferred automatically to payroll if the company has an integrated ESS, HRIS and payroll system. For optimum accuracy and efficiency, some HR software solutions transfer enrollment data electronically to benefit carriers, fully automating the entire process. With an electronic record of all transactions safely stored in the HR software, enrollment forms are never lost or misplaced and can quickly be retrieved months or even years later if needed!

 

For more information about automating your open enrollment processes, Web-based enrollment or communicating electronically (and paperlessly with carriers), download the Ascentis white paper Web-Based Online Enrollment or contact Ascentis today.

 

Twitt

Online Open Enrollment: Data to Make Your Case

Infographic - Online Open Enrollment: Data to Make Your Case

The traditional open enrollment period is a time consuming process that places a temporary, yet significant, burden on an organizations human resources (HR) department. Although some companies have more than one open enrollment period each calendar or fiscal ear, most businesses schedule a single annual event, often in the fall.

 

Open enrollment provides employees the opportunity to evaluate benefits such as health care, retirement and flexible spending plan− and make changes to their elections. For the employer, open enrollment is an opportunity to modify existing benefits packages to cut costs or increase total compensation values.

 

Unless a major life event like marriage, a birth or a death occurs, changes made during open enrollment are binding until the next open enrollment period. Because of this, it is important for HR to clearly and efficiently communicate benefit choices that are available. If effective communication is lacking, employee benefit selections can be inadequate, and create frustration for employees. This can breed organizational discontent and reflect poorly on the H department. It may even lead to employee retention issues.

What makes an enrollment period successful?

A successful open enrollment period should educate workers on benefit changes, options and out-of-pocket costs so informed decisions can be made − and enrollment forms processed without errors. If these objectives are achieved, employees will be more satisfied with their choices and H staff can moe on to other tasks. But with manual, paper-based open enrollment processes, outcomes are rarely this rosy or straightforward.

 

For many of you, open enrollment is still handled in the arduous, and error prone manual method. In the infographic below, you’ll learn what an effective online open enrollment looks like from a data flow and process perspective, as well as eight important facts you need to know about online open enrollment. Use this infographic to help make your case for purchasing an HRIS system so that you can automate your next open enrollment.

 

 

A paperless open enrollment process should:

 

• Increase efficiency throughout the entire open enrollment  process
• Reduce the time needed to execute each open enrollment  period
• Eliminate handwriting and data entry errors
• Improve employee satisfaction through more informed decision-making
• Decrease costs by eliminating paper and reducing redundant tasks

 

Learn more about what to online enrollment by downloading Ascentis’ whitepaper “Web-Based Online Enrollment: How a paperless process saves time, eliminates errors and increases employee satisfaction.” Just click here.

 

 

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The Future Of Onboarding

A guest blog post by author, Alexia Vernon 

 

Click here to go to AlexiaVernon.com

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar sponsored by Ascentis on the topic of the future of Onboarding – engaging employees from day 1, through the first 90 days of employment, and how it critically impacts the company culture. Just a few of the points covered were:

 

 

  • Why onboarding is NOT the same thing as orientation
  • How to design an effective first day experience
  • The EXACT information new hires need to know to succeed
  • Giving the right balance of structure and freedom to new employees
  • Strategies for building the key habits employees need to achieve and sustain success

 

If you missed it, sorry you couldn’t join us live. We had a great Q&A session afterward, but you can still view the recorded version here. You can also download the powerpoint presentation that I used during the presentation.

 

Click here to download the PPT

 

I spoke quite a bit about the importance of developing high-impact workplace communicators, particularly when over 50% of your new hires will be members of Generation Y by 2014. This is a topic I talk quite a bit about in my book 90 Days 90 Ways: Onboard Young Professionals to Peak Performance. In fact, I’d like to share you with a portion of Chapter 5 that covers this really well.

 

Excerpt from  90 Days 90 Ways: Onboard Young Professionals to Peak Performance. 

 

One of the most common deficits young professionals enter the workplace with is a lack of professional communication skills. And unfortunately, for young professionals and you, this deficit in communication is actually a combination of many deficits that run the gamut from a lack of professionalism, to not choosing the right medium for one’s audience, to a general inability to construct a well-developed, coherent argument. The reasons for these consistent communication blunders are numerous. First, there has been an increase in academic standardized testing, reducing the amount of educational time spent engaged in hands-on learning. Second, young professionals as we know spend a lot of time online and in front of a screen. And third, to be perfectly honest, the generation has placed little value on the skill or time developing professional communication skills.

 

You would be hard-pressed to find a study identifying anything other than communication as the number one skill employers look for in a prospective new hire. And public speaking is consistently ranked as the number one fear for people throughout the world. Yet most young professionals, unless they are communication majors, have taken just one or two communication courses in college. For me, and hopefully you, this is troubling.

 

Although college is supposed to prepare young people to be confident and competitive in the workforce—and to recap, employers really want good communicators, and people irrespective of age are terrified of public speaking—college students are not required and usually don’t select to take more than three to six credit hours to develop the competency. It’s easy to blame college communication programs for not hooking students into taking more courses, or for not doing enough during their one to two touches with the average college students. And given that I taught college public speaking for a number of years, I’m familiar with how most college students think about their introductory communication courses! But more importantly, I’m also aware of how just a little focused, smart work can meet young people where they are in their communication and get them where they need to be. In addition to having my college students perform their required informative and persuasive speeches, I made sure that they also learned how to successfully give a professional introduction, answer common interview questions, run an informational interview, and provide action-oriented feedback to their peers. Most of my students got As and Bs despite my being a rigorous grader. And my communication students still write me about how they are procuring jobs from informational interviews!

 

While every company necessitates a different kind of communicator, from my experience and research prepping young professionals to be dynamic speakers, I’ve identified a few core competencies that transcend a particular company, culture, or community…

 

If this sparks your interest, you can purchase a copy of my book here. And if the topic of employee engagement and growing a strong company culture is of interest to you, then follow me on Twitter @AlexiaVernon or sign up for Ascentis’ newsletter to get advance notice of my next four webinars with them in 2012.

 

If you want to talk to me about today’s webinar, just find me on Twitter, and use #OnBoardingFuture to tag our conversation.

Twitt

It’s Open Enrollment Season Again

 

We know that open enrollment season is one of the most stressful times for an HR department. Piles of paper and folders, phones ringing off the hook, answering the same questions over and over, deciphering messy handwriting … it’s time-consuming and fraught with the potential for errors.

To better streamline your company’s open enrollment period, companies should consider implementing an online, paperless enrollment process. This delivers your employees all the information they need to make the best decisions for themselves and their families, and then transmitting their benefits selections electronically to carriers.

Many companies are already experiencing this kind of effortless enrollment process enabled by Ascentis HRIS and self-service technologies. If you’re thinking about automating enrollment, here are three steps that are critical to making this process a success.

Step 1: Eliminate Paperwork and Go Green
With Ascentis Employee Self-Service you can take your open enrollment online. Publish plan documents, provider directories, beneficiary forms and more, for a truly green – and paperless – process.

Step 2: Use Smart and Efficient Communication Strategies
When you distribute printed benefits options, employees can be confused if they see all benefits options, including plans they’re not eligible for. With Ascentis, you push out to employees targeted plan options that intended ONLY for them, introducing clarity and simplicity into the process – for both the employee and for HR.

Step 3: Fully Automate Open Enrollment by Transmitting Data Directly to Payroll and Insurance Carriers
Ascentis automatically updates your payroll system with new deduction amounts, while electronically transmitting enrollment selections directly to your insurance carriers with Carrier Connect. This process virtually eliminates errors that can be introduced with a manual, paper-based process.

Want to learn more about simplifying your open enrollment period? Sign up for our August webinar today.

Aug. 10, 10 am, PDT
Aug. 24, 10 am, PDT

 

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