Being a business owner comes with an immense amount of documentation and information that constantly needs to be submitted to someone, somewhere. A lot of struggles business owners face all revolve around keeping up with paperwork and tasks that take time away from both growing and running their business.

As we live in a digital age, it’s no surprise that more and more businesses are utilizing technology to automate their processes and procedures, and a lot of them are starting right in the heart of their HR departments. One of the biggest time drains of the year for a business owner? Open enrollment. But luckily, you can automate that, too. And here’s why you should.

Give your time to what matters most.

As a business owner, your time is precious and should be spent growing your business, being attentive to the needs of your clients or customers and investing in your employees. The overall open enrollment process can consist of an enormous amount of preparation, execution, time lost chasing your employees to collect or complete their information, ensuring information is accurate, and then time spent submitting the information. Finalizing enrollment is just as time consuming as preparing and executing it.

Moving to online open enrollment automates this entire process for you. These platforms take out the majority of your prep work, collect and then submit the information for you. All that time you spend chasing down employees to verbally remind them to complete their benefit elections? Online open enrollment platforms do that for you and send reminders via text or e-mail. Finalizing documents and ensuring all information is collected before submission? These programs do that to. Get back your time and give it to what matters most – your business.

Protect your bottom line.

Online open enrollment eliminates multiple costs from printing sometimes hundreds of pages of documents to the labor hours that go into the entire process—studies show that online enrollment has saved businesses up to one week of labor costs. Imagine how much time employees spend physically filling out enrollment paperwork or waiting around to ask a question or assist them with filling out the form correctly – this all takes time away from your employees’ overall productivity and the time they could be spending doing their job.

Save your space.

A digital, online enrollment platform and HR automation programs will save the hassle of storing physical files that you ultimately have to keep somewhere physically in the office of your business. All employee onboarding documents, benefit elections, contact information and so much more can be centralized and stored into one platform that you can access anytime, anywhere.

Improve accuracy by avoiding errors and omissions.

Even the most experienced HR professionals and seasoned business owners can let an unsigned document or an enrollment package with missing or incorrect information slip through the cracks. All of these errors are minor, but can end up costing you a lot of money long term. If an enrollment deadline is missed by an employee, you could feel the negative effect from that in the upcoming year. Online open enrollment eliminates the possibilities these errors and makes the employee unable to even complete the process without completing it with accurate information.

Enhance the employee experience.

Your open enrollment process overall directly effects your employee experience—ensuring a streamlined open enrollment process takes the chaos away from both you and your team. Switching to online open enrollment gives your team accessibility anytime, anywhere. They’re able to compare policies, benefits and the costs associated on their own time, at their own speed. Integrating your open enrollment program with the benefits providers and carriers you currently use and/or shopping for makes the process seamless—when open enrollment is easy, you can guarantee it will also be easier to get your employees to participate.

Empower your employees.

With all of the necessary information needed at their fingertips and the ability to access enrollment at any time, your team can confidently make their benefits selections with peace of mind. They can discuss their options with family members that also may be included on their plan, and can walk through things at their own pace without feeling the pressure of feeling the need to rush through it. There’s no more shuffling through plan documents to answer an employee’s question, online enrollment programs will handle it for the employee both easily and quickly.

Are you ready to make the switch to online open enrollment or want to learn more? Click below to contact a member of our employee benefits team.

Learn more about streamlining your open enrollment processes and how to boost your benefits.