Do Your Employees Actually Understand Their Benefits During Open Enrollment?

Do Your Employees Actually Understand Their Benefits During Open Enrollment?

Open enrollment usually comes with a lot of information.

Plan options. Premiums. Deductibles. Deadlines. Emails. Forms.

Employers may spend weeks getting everything ready and making sure employees receive the information they need, but sending employees the information is only half the job.

Did you communicate the information that they need to make a decision?

That is a different question.

START WITH THE DECISIONS, NOT THE DOCUMENTS

Benefits information is often organized around the documents an employer needs to provide.

Try looking at it from the employee’s side instead.

What decisions does the employee actually need to make?

They may need to decide:

• Which medical plan fits their needs
• Whether to add a spouse or dependent
• Which optional benefits they want
• Whether they need to change current elections
• What they need to complete before the deadline

Establish a list of decision points like the ones above.  Once you know them, you can look at your open enrollment communication and ask whether employees have the information they need for each one.

1. SEPARATE “WHAT’S CHANGING” FROM “WHAT’S STAYING THE SAME”

Employees who already have benefits may not need another introduction to every plan.

They probably want to know one thing: What’s different this year?

Did premiums change? Did the deductible change? Is there a new carrier or network? Did you add or remove a benefit?

Put those changes somewhere employees can find quickly. Then provide the full plan information for anyone who wants or needs to dig deeper.

2. EXPLAIN COSTS BEYOND THE PAYCHECK

The premium coming out of each paycheck is easy to compare.

It is also only one part of what a health plan may cost an employee.

Employees may also need to compare deductibles, copays, coinsurance, out-of-pocket limits, and provider networks.

If your comparison only shows the payroll deduction, you may be downplaying the scale of the financial decision that they are actually making for their families.

3. TELL EMPLOYEES WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DO NOTHING

This deserves more than a sentence buried in an enrollment email.

What happens if an employee misses the deadline? Do current elections continue automatically? Does the employee lose certain benefits? Are there benefits that must be elected again?

Make the answer easy to find.

“No action required” and “you must make an election” are two very different messages.

Employees should not have to search through several pages of benefits information to figure out which one applies.

1. GIVE EVERY MESSAGE ONE JOB

More communication does not always mean better communication. Sending several long emails with the same information can make employees more likely to tune them out. Instead, give each message a job.

One email might explain enrollment dates and what is changing. Another might show employees where to compare their options. A reminder email might focus only on the deadline and what happens if they do nothing.

Employees do not need every detail in every message. They need the right information at the right time.

5. DECIDE WHO SHOULD ANSWER WHICH QUESTIONS

Employees are going to have questions during open enrollment.

Decide ahead of time where different types of questions should go.

Your HR team may handle enrollment questions. Your broker or carrier may be better equipped for detailed plan questions. Another resource may handle technical problems with the enrollment system.

Additionally, make sure managers know where to send employees.  A well-meaning manager can easily become an unofficial benefits expert and give an employee incomplete or incorrect information.

Managers do not need to know every answer or try to answer every question. They just need to know where to send employees for the right answers.

6. DO A 60-SECOND EMPLOYEE TEST

Before sending an open enrollment message or enrollment materials, give it one final test. Pretend you are an employee seeing the information for the first time.

Can you find these answers in about a minute?

• What changed this year?
• What decisions do I need to make?
• What will this cost me?
• What do I need to do?
• When is the deadline?
• What happens if I do nothing?
• Where do I go with questions?

Keep in mind that if an answer is difficult to find, adding more information may not solve the problem. You may need to make the important information easier to see.

COMMUNICATION IS PART OF THE PROCESS

Open enrollment problems are not always caused by missing information.

Sometimes all the information was technically provided. The problem was that an important detail was buried or unclear

For open enrollment, the goal is not simply to say everything. It is to make sure employees can find what they need, understand what matters, and know what to do next.

Before The Holiday Rush: 7 Payroll Details Worth Checking This Fall

Before The Holiday Rush: 7 Payroll Details Worth Checking This Fall

The end of the year can get busy fast.

Employees take time off. Holiday schedules change. Bonuses may be paid. Businesses bring on seasonal help. Then year-end reporting is right around the corner.

Before all of that hits, fall is a good time to check a few payroll details.

But don’t fall into the trap of only looking for obvious errors. Some of the most useful payroll reviews uncover things that look right on the surface but may not be working correctly behind the scenes.

Here are seven places worth a closer look.

1. LOOK BEYOND EMPLOYEE ADDRESSES

It makes sense to ask employees to confirm their name and address before year-end tax forms are prepared but take the review one step further.

Have any employees moved to a different state? Are employees working somewhere different from where they were hired? Did an employee change their name but never update the required records?

An address change can be more than a mailing issue. Depending on the situation, where an employee lives and works can affect payroll taxes and other employer requirements.

Don’t just ask employees, “Is your address correct?” without also asking yourself how this change whatever it is effects the bigger picture.

2. CHECK PTO RULES, NOT JUST PTO BALANCES

A balance can look correct while the rule creating that balance is wrong.

Before holiday PTO requests pick up, check how your system is actually handling PTO.

Are employees earning time at the correct rate? Does PTO stop or change at certain limits? Are different employee groups following different rules? What happens to unused time at year-end?

If your payroll or timekeeping system calculates PTO automatically, compare the system setup to your actual policy.  Automation only helps when the rule behind it is correct.

3. TEST HOLIDAY PAY BEFORE THE HOLIDAY

Do not make the holiday payroll your test run.

Before the first holiday arrives, confirm who receives holiday pay, how many hours they receive, and whether working on the holiday changes their pay.

Then test how those rules will actually be entered or calculated.

This matters even more if hourly, salaried, full-time, part-time, or other employee groups are treated differently.

A policy can be clear on paper and still be set up incorrectly in payroll.

4. WORK BACKWARD FROM PAYROLL DEADLINES

Bank holidays and office closures can shorten the normal payroll window.

Instead of only marking paydays on the calendar, work backward.

When does payroll need to be submitted? When must time cards be approved? When are payroll changes due? Who is responsible if the normal approver is out?

That last question is easy to miss during the holidays.

An earlier deadline does not help much if the one person who approves payroll is already on vacation.

5. DECIDE HOW EXTRA PAY WILL BE HANDLED

Year-end bonuses, commissions, incentives, and other extra pay can create last-minute payroll questions.

Before sending a list of payments to payroll, confirm what is being paid, when it should be paid, who approved it, and how it should be treated.

Do not assume every extra payment works the same way.

Giving your payroll team the information early creates time to identify questions before the payroll is already being processed.

6. REVIEW MANUAL PAYROLL CHANGES

If you only have time to review one group of payroll changes, start with the ones someone entered manually.

Look at manual adjustments, overrides, new deductions, pay-rate changes, PTO corrections, and other items that required someone to change the normal setup.

Manual changes are sometimes necessary. But they are also worth reviewing because they may not follow the same automatic rules as the rest of your payroll.

Be sure to ask at least two questions:

• Was the change entered correctly?
• Was it supposed to be temporary or permanent?

That second question can uncover settings that were meant for one payroll but never got changed back.

7. FIND YOUR REPEAT CORRECTIONS

Finally, look at the payroll problems you’ve already fixed this year.

Do managers repeatedly miss time card approvals? Does the same type of PTO correction keep showing up? Are hours regularly adjusted after they are submitted?

Look at the pattern because a recurring payroll correction is information. It may be telling you that a deadline is unclear, a system setting is wrong, someone needs training, or the process itself needs to change.

USE FALL AS A PAYROLL TEST RUN

You do not need to audit an entire year of payroll records before the holidays.

Instead, use the quieter weeks before the year-end rush to test the parts of payroll that are about to get more complicated.

Check the rules behind PTO and holiday pay. Review manual changes. Work backward from holiday deadlines. Look for repeat corrections.

You aren’t just looking for something that’s wrong today. You’re thinking ahead and looking for something that could become a much bigger problem during the busiest payroll weeks of the year..

The Most Expensive Business Problems Usually Don’t Start That Way

The Most Expensive Business Problems Usually Don’t Start That Way

Most business problems don’t start with alarms going off.

They start with something small.

A new employee starts before everything is ready. A manager has an important conversation but never writes it down. Someone notices something odd on payroll and assumes it’s fine.

Nothing terrible happened that day, so everyone moves on.

That is often how a small process problem gets the chance to become a much bigger one.

THE MISTAKE MAY NOT BE THE BIGGEST PROBLEM

Every business makes mistakes. A missed step, wrong entry, or forgotten task does not automatically turn into a major problem.

What matters is how quickly someone catches it.

Imagine a payroll error causes an employee to receive an extra $100. Catch it on the first payroll, and you have a $100 problem to solve.

But what if nobody catches it?

The same error happens again. Six months later, you may need to figure out how many employees were affected, how much money is involved, when the problem started, and how to correct it.

However, the original mistake is still the same.

What changed is the amount of time it went undetected.

We spend a lot of time trying to prevent mistakes but catching them quickly can be just as important.

DOES YOUR PROCESS KNOW WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG?

Most business processes are built around how work is supposed to get done.

Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Done.

But there’s at least one other question worth asking:

What tells us when the process did not work?

Completing an I-9 may be part of onboarding. But what tells you when one is missing?

A manager may be responsible for employee documentation. But who notices when it never gets completed?

Payroll may be reviewed before it’s processed. But would that review catch the same error twice?

This creates a detection gap. A detection gap is the time between when a problem starts and when someone notices it. The longer that gap lasts, the more opportunity a small mistake has to grow.

5 SIGNS YOU MAY HAVE A DETECTION GAP

1. The same problem keeps coming back.

Fixing the result is not the same as fixing the cause. If the same mistake keeps happening, something in the process may be allowing it.

2. You usually find problems by accident.

An employee asks a question. Someone happens to notice a strange number. A manager stumbles across a missing document. Those are good catches, but accidental discovery is not a reliable safety net.

3. Nobody knows who checks the final results.

Completing a task and checking that it was completed correctly are different things. If everyone assumes someone else is checking, errors can sit unnoticed.

4. One employee is the control system.

If your answer is, “Susan would notice that,” you may have more risk than you think.

Experienced employees often know what looks wrong. But what happens when Susan is on vacation, changes roles, or leaves the company? If one person is your only safeguard, some of that knowledge needs to become part of a permanent and repeatable process.

5. You can fix the problem, but you can’t tell when it started.

Imagine finding an incorrect payroll setting today. You know how to fix it going forward, but can you tell when it changed?

Yesterday? Three months ago? Last year?

If you can’t determine how long a problem has been happening, figuring out its true impact can be much harder.

LOOK FOR THE DETECTION GAP

Choose one process you rely on regularly and ask:

• What could go wrong?
• What would alert us that it happened?
• Who would notice?
• How quickly would we know?
• Could we tell when the problem started?

Those questions go deeper than asking whether your business has a process. They tell you whether the process has a way to catch itself when something goes wrong because the fact is that mistakes are going to happen at some point, and the faster you can catch the mistake the less costly it will be.

How to Eliminate Unnecessary Business Processes

When Was the Last Time You Stopped Doing Something in Your Business?

Businesses are really good at adding things.

A new report. Another approval. An extra step in a process. A weekly meeting. A spreadsheet to track information that’s already being tracked somewhere else.

Usually, there was a good reason for adding it.

The problem is that we don’t always go back and ask whether that reason still exists.

Over time, businesses can end up with a surprising amount of work that’s being done for one simple reason:

We’ve always done it that way.

How Unnecessary Work Sticks Around

Most inefficient business processes don’t start out inefficient.

Maybe a report was created because a particular manager wanted to see those numbers every Friday. That manager left two years ago, but someone still creates the report every week.

Maybe an approval was added after one expensive mistake. Now every request requires three signatures, even though the original problem was addressed years ago.

Maybe employees enter information into one system and then copy it into a spreadsheet because, at some point, someone needed both.

Nobody intentionally decided to waste time.

The process just stayed.

And when something becomes routine, we tend to stop questioning it.

Try the “Why Are We Still Doing This?” Test

For one week, pay attention to the routine work happening around you.

When you notice something that seems unnecessarily complicated, don’t immediately change it. Just ask a few questions:

• Who actually uses this?
• What would happen if we stopped doing it?
• Why does this need an approval?
• Are we entering the same information more than once?
• Could this process have fewer steps?
• Is this solving a problem that still exists?

You may find that everything has a perfectly good reason.

You may also discover that no one actually knows why something is being done.

That’s worth knowing.

Don’t Confuse Familiar With Necessary

There’s a reason changing a process can make people uncomfortable. Familiar processes feel safe because everyone already knows how they work.

But “this is how we do it” and “this is the best way to do it” are two very different things.

That doesn’t mean every old process needs to go. Some extra steps protect the business. Some approvals are important. Some reports really are useful.

The goal isn’t to remove steps just for the sake of removing them. It’s to make sure the work you’re asking people to do still has a purpose.

Sometimes Saving Time Means Doing Less

When businesses look for ways to improve productivity or create more capacity, it’s natural to focus on how work is getting done.

Sometimes there’s a much easier answer:

Stop doing work that doesn’t need to be done.

Removing one unnecessary 15-minute task may not sound significant.

But if five employees do it every week, that’s 65 hours of work over the course of a year.

And that’s just one task.

When you’re looking for ways to save time, don’t just look at how the work is getting done. Take a closer look at whether all of it still needs to be done in the first place.

You might find some time hiding in plain sight.

Take a Broader Look at Your Business

Unnecessary processes are just one of the things that can be difficult to notice when you’re focused on running a business every day.

TEL Staffing & HR created the free Small Business Report Card to help you step away from the day-to-day and take a broader look at four areas of your business: People, Operations, Compliance & Protection, and Growth & Scalability.

It’s a quick way to identify what’s working well and where it might be worth taking a closer look.

Take a few minutes. Be honest. See how your business measures up.

Could Your Business Handle 25% More Business Tomorrow?

Most businesses want to grow.

More customers. More revenue. More opportunities.

But here’s a question we don’t ask nearly as often:

What would happen if you got 25% more business tomorrow?

Not six months from now, after you’ve had time to hire, train, plan, and prepare.

Tomorrow.

Would your business be ready for it?

Growth Has a Way of Finding the Weak Spots

When business is steady, it’s easier to work around things that aren’t quite working.

An inefficient process is annoying, but manageable. An employee can pick up the slack when something falls behind. A manager can jump in when there’s a problem.

Add 25% more work, and those little problems don’t stay little for long.

More business puts pressure on your people, processes, customer service, technology, and leadership.

That’s why preparing for business growth isn’t just about figuring out how to bring in more customers.

It’s also about making sure you’re ready to serve them when they arrive.

Ask Yourself These Five Questions

You don’t need a complicated growth strategy to start thinking about whether your business is prepared. Begin with five questions.

1. Could your current team handle more work?

If business increased tomorrow, who would feel it first? If your team is already stretched thin, growth may create burnout before it creates opportunity.

2. What would become a bottleneck?

Think about the work that already slows down when things get busy. A process that’s difficult to manage at your current volume is likely to become an even bigger problem when there’s more work moving through it.

3. Could you add employees quickly if you needed them?

Hiring when you’re already overwhelmed can lead to rushed decisions. Knowing which roles you’ll need next, and what you’ll expect from them, puts you in a much better position when the time comes.

4. Would your customer experience stay the same?

Growth isn’t much of a win if longer wait times, missed calls, delayed orders, or inconsistent service start costing you the customers you already have.

5. Does too much still depend on one person?

If one owner, manager, or key employee has to touch every important decision, there may be a limit to how much the business can grow before that person becomes the bottleneck.

You Don’t Have to Be Ready for Everything

Being ready for growth doesn’t mean hiring people you don’t need yet or building systems for a company three times your current size.

It means knowing where the pressure points are before more pressure arrives.

Try this:

Imagine that tomorrow morning you learn your workload is increasing by 25% and it’s going to stay that way.

What’s the first thing you’d be worried about?

Your answer is probably a pretty good place to start.

It could be your team’s capacity, a process that already struggles when things get busy, unclear responsibilities, or simply not having a plan for what happens when the next opportunity comes along.

Growth is a lot easier to manage when you’re preparing for it instead of reacting to it.

How Ready Is Your Business?

Growth is only one measure of business health. The strength of your people, operations, and compliance practices all affect how well your organization can handle whatever comes next.

TEL Staffing & HR created the free Small Business Report Card to help you take a broader look at four areas: People, Operations, Compliance & Protection, and Growth & Scalability.

You may already know where your business is strong. The more interesting question is whether there are areas you haven’t thought to look at yet.

Take a few minutes. Be honest. See how your business measures up.

Hidden Business Risks You May Be Overlooking | TEL Staffing & HR

Are Employee Expectations Clear in Your Business?

How to Improve Small Business Operations

How to Improve Small Business Operations

Your Business Is Busy. But Is It Actually Running Well?

A full inbox. Employees asking questions. Customers needing answers. Deadlines coming up. A problem that needs to be handled before lunch.

At the end of a day like that, it can feel like you’ve been incredibly productive. And maybe you have been. But sometimes, being busy can feel productive even when the things keeping you busy are actually slowing your business down.

Fixing recurring problems, tracking down information, redoing work, or stepping in when something falls through the cracks all keep you moving. They give you something to solve, answer, or check off the list. But getting through a long list of problems isn’t necessarily the same as making progress.

When you’re focused on keeping up with the day-to-day, it’s easy for those things to simply become part of the routine. The work still gets done, customers are taken care of, and you move on to the next thing.

So everything must be working. Right?

Not necessarily.

Busy Can Hide Problems

Think about a normal week in your business.

Do employees ask the same questions repeatedly?

Does one person seem to be the only one who knows how to do certain things?

Are managers constantly stepping in to fix problems?

Do you have things you’ve been saying “we need to fix that” about for months?

Individually, none of these feels like a crisis. That’s exactly why they’re easy to ignore.

The problem usually becomes obvious when something changes. Someone quits. A key employee takes vacation. Business suddenly picks up. A mistake becomes more expensive than it was last time.

That’s when a small inefficiency can quickly become a much bigger problem.

One of the Easiest Ways to Improve Your Business Operations

Improving your business operations doesn’t always require a major overhaul. In fact, depending on the problem, a small change can sometimes make a bigger difference than rebuilding an entire process. The best place to start may be simply looking at what keeps repeating.

Every business has occasional problems. Patterns are different.

A five-minute problem once probably isn’t worth worrying about. But a five-minute problem that happens every week adds up to more than four hours over the course of a year. If it happens every workday, that’s more than 21 hours spent on the same small problem.

And that’s just one pattern.

If employees regularly need clarification about the same task, the process may not be clear.

If everything has to go through one manager, too much may depend on one person.

If new employees struggle to learn things everyone else considers “common knowledge,” important information may not be documented.

And if your team is spending so much time putting out fires that no one has time to figure out why they keep starting, that’s worth paying attention to.

The goal isn’t to overhaul everything that’s imperfect. It’s to notice the small, repeated problems that quietly take up time and decide which ones are worth fixing. Sometimes a small adjustment to the right problem can have a much bigger impact than you expect.

Try This for One Week

You don’t need a new system or a three-hour strategy meeting. Just pay attention.

For one week, make a quick note every time:

• Someone asks a question you’ve heard repeatedly
• Work has to be redone
• Something gets delayed waiting on one person
• No one is sure who owns a task
• You stop what you’re doing to solve an avoidable problem

At the end of the week, look at your list.

You may discover that what felt like five unrelated frustrations actually points to one business process worth fixing.

You don’t have to fix everything at once. You just have to know where to start.

How Well Is Your Business Really Running?

Operations are only one piece of a healthy business.

How well your business runs also depends on your people, how prepared you are for potential risks, and whether your current way of doing things can keep working as your business changes.

That’s why TEL Staffing & HR created the Small Business Report Card.

This free self-assessment helps you step away from the day-to-day for a few minutes and take an honest look at four areas of your business: People, Operations, Compliance & Protection, and Growth & Scalability.

When you’re finished, you’ll have a clearer picture of what’s working, what could use some attention, and where it may make sense to focus next.

Take a few minutes. Be honest. See how your business measures up.