Offering great employee benefits is a smart way to attract and keep top talent. But it’s not enough to simply set them up and leave employees to it. To make it work, you need an efficient process to manage these benefits.
This process – known as employee benefits administration – ensures that you can provide tailored plans that suit your employees, action requests quickly, and communicate benefits effectively. In this guide, we’ll explain all you need to know about managing your business’s employee benefits.
What Is Employee Benefits Administration?
Employee benefits administration is the process of managing the perks and rewards that you as an employer offer to your workforce. It involves:
- Designing and explaining benefit plans
- Assisting employees with enrolment
- Keeping records
- Ensuring legal compliance
- Effective communication.
This admin work can cover Group Health Insurance, Workplace Pensions, Salary Sacrifice schemes and more. It’s about helping employees make the most of these benefits while keeping costs in check.
Businesses that are on-the-ball use employee benefits technology, such as My.Drewberry, to streamline the process and provide easy access for employees. In a nutshell, it’s all about providing valuable benefits, making sure employees know how to use them, and taking the heavy lifting out of the paperwork. These clever tools can help with:
- Streamlining the new joiners / leavers process
- Juggling multiple benefit schemes and different providers
- Mitigating risk
- Keeping changes to benefits up to date (e.g. changing pension contributions or adding family members to benefits plans).
Why Is It Important To Manage Employee Benefits?
“For every minute spent organising, an hour is earned”… basically, if you want a competitive employee benefits program, it needs to be efficiently managed.
But it’s not just about crossing the Ts and dotting the Is – well-managed benefits programs can save HR teams hours if done effectively, and actually contribute to higher employee satisfaction. When employees feel that their benefits meet their needs, they’re more likely to stick around, reducing recruitment and training costs.
Plus, with 24% of UK workersbeing unhappy with their employer’s benefits offering, a well-managed employee benefits program not only enhances employee wellbeing but also makes sound business sense. It attracts top talent and fosters employee loyalty by creating a workplace culture where people feel valued and supported.
The Challenges Of Employee Benefits Management
So we know that managing employee benefits is important, but it can be tough to do it right, no matter the size of your organisation. Some of the most common challenges employers face include:
- Choosing valuable benefits: Figuring out which benefits are most attractive to employees can be tricky. The range of benefits is ever-expanding, and employee preferences are always changing. Without the right tools to navigate these options and understand what employees want, it’s tough to balance competitiveness and affordability.
- Compliance management: Staying compliant with ever-changing laws and regulations can be complex, and it adds more work and stress to your benefits administrator. Failing to comply can lead to costly legal issues and damage your reputation.
- Employee Communication: Enrolment can become chaotic when employees don’t understand the different options. HR teams can get swamped with benefits-related questions, diverting their attention from essential administrative tasks. And adding individual communication and education makes it even more challenging to oversee efficiently.
- Rising costs: We’re all feeling the pinch, and keeping benefits costs within budget is a constant struggle. Manual and labour-intensive processes also hinder productivity, making cost management a difficult task without proper tools to forecast enrolment trends and labour costs.
- Time management: Between managing multiple systems, communicating with various providers, negotiating contracts, and constructing packages, the employee benefits management process can get chaotic. Without expert help or automated processes, it can be overwhelming and reduce productivity.
So how can you avoid these pitfalls? The answer is having a sound process and the right tools to help you manage your benefits packages.
The 5 Step Employee Benefits Administration Process
Benefits administration doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you’re new to it, or just looking for a smoother process, follow these steps:
Step 1: Choose Your Benefits Package
The first thing to do is choose what benefits package you want to offer your employees. You can pick from a range of core benefits such as Employee Life Insurance, along with wellness programs, enhanced parental leave, and perks like Cycle To Work and retail discounts. You can then tailor them to your business and what you think your employees will get the most use out of.
Step 2: Do Your Compliance Checks
Make sure you’re on top of the compliance aspects and tax implications of your benefits package. As a UK employer, there are some mandatory benefits that you need to provide as standard, and different perks are taxed and regulated differently (such as Workplace Pensions), so it’s a good idea to get help from an employee benefits expert (like us at Drewberry™) so you make sure you’re meeting the correct standard.
Step 3: Educate Employees
There’s no use spending time and money creating a great benefits package if your employees don’t use or know about them. Make benefits education part of the new starter onboarding process, and ensure you’re regularly communicating the rewards and perks to your existing staff.
Total Rewards Statements are a great way to communicate the total value of everything you offer your staff. They show employees the value of all of their benefits and salary in one place (e.g. if they have a salary of £30,000 but all their benefits equate to £5,000 their total reward would be £35,000).
Step 4: Check Your Costs
Try to find a balance between benefits that employees value and what’s cost-effective for the company. You can use your benefits software to keep your package affordable, and see which benefits have low take up so you can improve comms, tweak the offering, or replace them with something more valuable to your staff.
Step 5: Be Open To Feedback And Changes
Keep your benefits package flexible and responsive to employee feedback, HR processes, or company changes. Establish a procedure for making changes and communicating them effectively.
Employee benefits admin is much easier when you have our friendly experts at your side. Give us a call on 02074425880 or email help@drewberry.co.uk to see how we can help.
How To Improve Your Employee Benefits Administration
There are a few key things you can do to make your employee benefits administration smoother and more efficient:
Have A Clear Benefits Strategy
By making a clear plan of action, you can ensure that the benefits you offer align with the needs of your employees and business. Ask yourself:
- What do you want your benefits to help with?
- Do you want to aid retention and recruitment, or do you want to make staff more engaged?
- Do you need to reduce costs by streamlining benefits?
When you understand what you want your employee benefits to do, it’s easier to measure your success. Here’s how to get started with a Total Reward Strategy.
Go Paperless
Paperwork, right? Between spreadsheets, letters, and emails from both employees and providers, it’s easy to lose track of things. Going paperless or managing your benefits in one system will make life a lot easier for your benefits administrator.
Give Employees The Option To Self-Serve
Give employees the ability to access and manage their benefits online. Self-service portals for updating personal information, making benefit elections, reviewing plan documents, adding/removing family members, and nominating beneficiaries will take some of the admin off your desk, and speed up things like scheme enrolment and changes.
Automate where possible
Use benefits administration software to automate routine tasks and reduce manual paperwork. You can automate notifications to stay on top of things – your employees will appreciate your organised approach.
Ensure Data Accuracy & Conduct Regular Audits
Make sure your employee records are accurate and up-to-date, scheduling regular audits and verifying information to avoid errors during the admin process. Also, conduct periodic audits of your benefits plans and administration processes to spot any issues and identify opportunities to improve.
Technology Integration
Invest in benefits administration software that can integrate with your HR and payroll systems. That way you’ll have one source of truth to work from when communicating and managing your benefits packages.
The right tech can improve your admin processes with clever automation (think automatic updates to employees when benefit selections are approved, automatic updates sent to providers once selections are approved etc) and provide and audit trail to ensure data accuracy.
Outsource When Necessary
Does your benefits administrator have too much on their plate? Consider outsourcing benefits administration to the experts if you’re struggling to find the resources or knowledge to manage benefits properly.
Our experts at Drewberry live and breathe employee benefits. They can benchmark your offering against competitors, find you the best deals, provide constant support, and provide regular audits and reviews to make sure you’re offering the most relevant and valuable rewards to your workforce. Take a look at our Should We Use A Benefits Broker? guide.
Using Technology To Manage Employee Benefits
One of the simplest things you can do to take the pain out of the admin is to use a purpose-made employee benefits software. The right bit of tech can simplify the process, reduce errors, and enhance the overall employee experience – not to mention improving your efficiency and compliance.
A good software platform (like My.Drewberry) will be a user-friendly, one-stop solution for employees to view, choose, and manage their benefits, making the process more convenient and efficient for both employees and HR teams.
But if you find yourself overwhelmed with options, you’re not alone. To help, here are some factors to consider when choosing the right platform for you:
Scalability
Any software you choose to manage your employee benefits should be scalable, and capable of accommodating your future needs. If your business has growth plans, you’ll want a solution that can adapt. And grow with you.
Automation
Look for a software solution that offers automation. Benefits administration involves a lot of repetitive but complex processes, and automation can save you valuable time and effort and minimise the risk of errors. No more spending hours adding new starters and removing leavers.
Integrations
The best employee benefits platforms integrate seamlessly with your other HR software, allowing you to incorporate it into your existing workflows with minimal fuss. For instance, My.Drewberry can be easily integrated with various HRIS systems, including BambooHR, Google Workspace, Breathe, and HiBob.
Transparency
Choose a provider that’s transparent about their benefit offerings. We see many businesses coming to us after being promised an all-singing-all-dancing platform that never delivered, or expecting a holistic solution that, in reality, had limited functionality. A provider should be able to clearly demonstrate what their product does and how their software can address your company’s needs.
Self-Service For Employees
Your platform should not only help your benefits administrator, but it should also make things easier for your employees. A self-serve platform will encourage employees to enrol, amend, and access the benefits that you pay for, reducing the burden on HR teams with disjoined emails and admin requests.
Support And Forecasting
Look for solutions that offer useful insights and forecasting tools to help you plan and predict benefits trends. Find gaps, measure what’s being used, and predict the financial impact, helping you create cost-effective, employee-friendly benefit plans.
What is the difference between benefits manager and benefits administrator?
A benefits manager typically oversees the strategic aspect of employee benefits. They tend to focus on designing, developing and evaluating a companies benefits strategy to ensure it aligns with both business goals and employee needs.
Benefits Administrators on the other hand, are more involved in the day-to-day operations related to managing and implementing the benefits programme, for example adding new joiners from schemes, removing leavers, answering queries etc. Both roles involve a lot of time and resource, this is why many companies outsource their benefits management and use a benefits platform such as My.Drewberry to help save time and streamline processes.
Should I outsource my employee benefits administration?
Outsourcing can be beneficial, it can lead to cost savings, improved efficiency or access to expertise that isn’t available in house. Before deciding whether or not to use a benefits broker it’s always best to be clear on what you want help with. Then arrange to speak with some consultancies such as Drewberry, who can provide a tailored approach to suit your specific needs.
How often should I review my employee benefits offering?
Nothing stays the same for long. Business strategies evolve and the needs of employees change. With this in mind, it’s best to review your benefits at least annually. By conducting regular reviews you can ensure your benefits remain competitive, compliant and aligned with your employee value.
Don’t let employee benefits be a pain in the admin
Managing employee benefits can be tricky, but the right experts make it easier. Drewberry helps your HR team work more efficiently, empower employees, and make more informed decisions.
By nailing your employee benefits admin, you can create an offering that’s cost-effective and meet the needs of both employees and HR teams.
Why Speak to Us?
We started Drewberry™ because we were tired of being treated like a number.
We all deserve a first class service when it comes to things as important as protecting our health and our finances. Below are just a few reasons why it makes sense to talk to us.
