Breaking the Paper Chain

Tom Miller, CEO of Financial Concepts, an employee benefits and asset management consulting firm based in Plymouth, says that for him and his clients, right now “paper is not a thing of the past. It’s going in that direction, but there are challenges for employers, and I would just call it demographics. If I’m in manufacturing, how can I have all my folks go on line?”

Miller says that while the trend in the industry may be toward a day when employees can go on line, push a button, and be enrolled in a benefit plan, he thinks a lot of carriers aren’t at that level yet.

However, Kari Larsen, a senior partner with The Stanton Group, a provider of employee benefit plans and consulting services in Plymouth, says “Most companies want to use the Web.” In her experience, at least part of a firm’s employee benefits program is administered on line. Larsen says even having a portion of benefits communications on line results in reduced errors, simplified processes, and reduced staff time.

Online Functions

The migration to all-online benefits administration is still a little bumpy. Larsen says that some benefit carriers are struggling with the issue of electronic signatures, so paper forms are still necessary even when employees do most of their enrollment online. Making sure a company’s Internet interface with insurance carriers is foolproof can be a difficult task. Security and privacy aspects of employee benefits administration must be scrupulously monitored.

But even if actual open enrollment on line remains a wish rather than a reality for smaller companies, intranets and Web portals still offer those businesses tremendous value. “I think one of the biggest possibilities of the intranet and Internet sites is that they’re available [to employees] 24 hours a day,” she says. That way, employees can research their options, view models of their potential choices, and compare plans when they want to, even if their final enrollment is still managed in another way.

Miller says his company uses an Internet-based system called My Benefits View, designed and hosted by OnlineBenefits, to create individual portals for customers. “It’s strictly a portal, and it can have the company logo on it; you can put company news on it, saying ‘The company picnic is here,’ or ‘It’s 28 days until open enrollment.’ It’s an entire system geared to benefits communication,” he says.

Paperless Benefits

David Slavney, a principal and senior communications consultant for Mercer Human Resource Consulting, who serves the Midwest area from his base in St. Louis, agrees that the benefit world has changed significantly in recent years. “One of the things that I spend a lot of time working with clients on is, how do we take what would be traditional communications and apply technology to that? In other words, how do we use lots of different media within an organization?” he says.