Employers can often underestimate the power of good benefits and consider them just another expense. However, good benefits have an incredible drawing power, especially if the job itself has lower pay. Potential employees might be willing to take less in salary or wages, if in turn, they receive stellar benefits. Yet employers — especially in smaller businesses — can also see benefits as an HR nightmare, especially if their staff has a high turnover rate or they hire a significant number of part-time employees. However, there’s a simple solution for making whatever benefits you offer worth your while. Employee benefits administration software is a fantastic option to streamline your benefits enrollment process and manage them thereafter. Usually employee benefits administration software will also give you other additional human resource management tools as well.
Understanding the Importance of Benefits
To begin with, half of employees say that their benefits are a strong reason they’re sticking with their current employer. So not only do good benefits provide a reason to go after a certain employer, they also offer strong motivation to stay with that employer as well. And in a world where there’s typically a lot of changeover and many employees switch jobs after five to ten years, that’s important!
Good benefits like paid vacation time or other perks can also help cut down on “cyberloafing,” which between 60-80% of employees do, despite restrictive company policies. Vacation time can make employees more focused and engaged with their job and appreciative of the paid time they receive.
Additionally, even the government has taken steps to regulate certain benefits like health insurance, paid holidays, and job protection. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandate that organizations have to extend appropriate health care benefits to all employees when they reach 50 full time employees — and that number includes hours worked by part time employees as well. And FMLA (the Family and Medical Leave Act) gives employees three months of unpaid leave for a new child, care of a family member or spouse, or self-care for medical conditions — but with job security. That means that the employer can’t take those three months and then return to find his or her job has been taken over by someone else. Although they’ll have some lost wages, they’ll at least have a job to return to once they go back to work.
What Is Employee Benefits Administration Software?
Employee benefits administration software is a type of human resources software that allows employers to control their employee benefits using either an online system and portal or a third party that runs the software themselves. Many times the software is cloud-based and can be accessed on a mobile device so that employees can see their current benefits — available sick leave or vacation days may be tracked on this software, for example. Managing employee benefits becomes a much simpler task with this kind of software available.
How Can Employee Benefits Administration Software Help My Business?
For one thing, this type of software streamlines the entire benefits process and many softwares also come with other HR benefits, like payroll and compliance. It’s an online system, so no more poring through physical sheets of paper and filling those out for each employee! You can manage everything online — from payroll to paid time off. New employees can be enrolled and verified using these systems and their information, forms, enrollment, and life events can all be tracked using this type of software. Employees benefit by being able to sign forms online and see what coverage they have by simply logging into their account. A certain amount of confusion is eliminated by being able to see everything all at once — they’ll know how many sick days they have, how much vacation time, what their health insurance covers, and much more!
It’s certainly in your best interests to look into getting employee benefits administration software for your company, especially if you feel that a significant chunk of your time is spent managing or entering benefits data. Why not make the whole process easier by managing it online and all in one place?
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