With the employment rate hovering around 4.2%, finding skilled workers can be a challenge. By offering better benefits, you can entice new hires, reward current workers, and raise your retention rates. However, for your benefits to be successful, you need the right approach to managing them. Through better benefits management, you can reduce costs and boost your overall productivity. 

What Is Benefits Management? 

At its heart, benefits management involves all of the processes involved in giving your employees their benefits. It includes all of the ways you design, select, implement, educate, and administer your employees’ benefits throughout each employee’s lifecycle. 

• Selection of Benefits: First, you have to determine your budget. Then, you can compare your company’s budget to the list of desired benefits and decide which ones you can implement.
• Program Design: Afterward, your company can pick benefits providers and design the details of the plan. Researching different benefits providers can be confusing, which is why many companies use a benefit services provider for choosing and managing their employee benefits.
• Implementation: Once you’ve figured out the benefits your company needs, it’s time to set up the different plans and put them into action. Ideally, you should find a single platform or software provider, so you can set up and access all of the plan-related information and forms from one location.
• Employee Education: Even if you offer the best benefits in the world, it won’t help if the employees don’t know how to sign up and use them. In addition to creating employee education tools, you should place someone in charge of your benefits administration who can answer all of their questions and provide ongoing support.
• Administering Benefits: As a part of administering benefits, you need to update employee accounts with new information, manage benefits for workers who have been terminated, onboard new hires, and collect employee feedback.
• Ongoing Support: After an employee leaves, you may have to continue to provide employees with certain benefits for set amounts of time. COBRA is an important example of this type of requirement. Through COBRA, the employee and their dependents can have extended coverage for up to 18 months and 36 months, respectively. Managing this type of support isn’t just important. In some cases, it’s also a legal requirement.
• Compliance Changes: Over time, there will likely be many regulatory updates for some of the benefits you offer. As a part of benefits management, your company will need to adjust its policies as laws change. 
• Data Analysis and Updates: To make sure your benefits plan is as effective as possible, collect employee feedback and monitor participation rates. Then, you can update the types of benefits you offer as you get more data.

How Benefits Management Improves Your Retention and Reduces Costs

Gallup has found that 30% of employees who leave their jobs would have stayed if their employer had better pay and benefits. In fact, 42% of workers reported that their managers could have done something to convince them to stay. 

Low retention rates aren’t just an inconvenience. They can also get expensive very quickly, thanks to recruitment, training, and onboarding costs. Through better benefits management, you can lower your existing labor costs and prevent low retention rates.

Waste Less Labor Hours

Investing in benefits management can save you money in the long run. When you work with an outsourced benefits administrator or use a benefits administration platform, you can automate many benefits management functions and save on labor costs. 

The right platform ensures easy record keeping and instant integrations. Because data can be migrated from one benefit program to another, it also prevents data entry errors and reduces the amount of time your HR workers have to spend updating employee records.

Enhance Job Satisfaction 

When you improve job satisfaction, it makes employees less likely to leave. Better benefits show you care about your workers. Many of these benefits, like health insurance and retirement savings, improve their financial well-being and health, so they experience less stress. Altogether, these factors contribute to better job satisfaction and morale.

According to SHRM, 60% of workers report that benefits are a very important factor in their job satisfaction. If your goal is to boost retention rates and save money on hiring costs, start by creating happier employees through better benefits management.

Increase Productivity

From better employee satisfaction to lower turnover, improving your benefits management can boost productivity in several important ways. When employees are less concerned about the state of their finances and feel supported by their employer, they perform better. 

Better benefits management improves your productivity in a different way as well. At its heart, productivity reflects the goods and services a company can produce for a given input level. When you become more efficient at managing benefits and reduce the cost of this labor activity, it lowers the cost of doing business and your productivity increases.

Avoid Costly Penalties and Fees

Finally, effective benefits management saves money on penalties and fees. For example, the following list includes just a few of the most common laws that you need to follow when you offer employee benefits.

• Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA)
• Affordable Care Act (ACA)
• Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA)
• Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)

As an employer, you need to make sure you file the appropriate paperwork on time, classify workers properly, and maintain all of the records you are required to. If you make common benefits-related mistakes, it can end up costing you significantly in penalties and fees. By partnering with an experienced benefits administrator, you can lower your costs by avoiding unnecessary penalties.

Learn More About Benefits Management

Through better benefits management, you can spend less providing the same benefits to your workers. In turn, these benefits can increase your retention rates, productivity, and employee satisfaction. 

More importantly, you don’t have to learn compliance regulations and employment law from scratch. Instead, you can outsource your benefits administration and achieve high-quality results with a fraction of the time or money.

For more information about how Asure can support your benefits management goals, reach out to our team of small business payroll and HR experts today.