There a several key steps to enroll an employee in their benefits.
In this article, I go through all these key steps and why they are important.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Be prepared to enroll the employee.
Before you begin, you want to make sure that you are prepared to enroll the employee.
This means:
- Have a copy of the employee benefits guide and benefits summaries.
- Have access to SBC’s, SPD’s, any sold proposals, policies, policy certificates and other benefit information
- Review all benefit information so that you know how each of the benefits work
- If there is anything that isn’t clear to you about how a benefit works, ask about those questions before you start enrolling
- Know all the enrollment platform website URL’s you need to access along with their usernames and passwords
- Get into the enrollment platform to make sure that you can enroll an employee and that the enrollment steps are correct
- Be prepared to print out or email any benefit summaries to employees.
Employees will appreciate working with someone who knows what they are doing and can answer their questions.
Step 2: Review the enrollment process with the employee
Let the employee know what the enrollment process is and why it’s important.
Here are the enrollment steps:
- Verify the employee
- Update personal information
- Update demographic information
- Name a beneficiary for any employer provided life insurance
- Present each benefit
- Enroll or decline each benefit
- Confirm each election or decline
- Provide a benefits summary
It’s not unusual for employees to resist going through the enrollment process. This is because they assume they do not want to enroll in any benefits.
They will often tell you they want to waive everything up front or they want to keep everything the same as they had the year before if this is during open enrollment.
Remind employees they do not need to enroll in any benefits but that you need to still complete each of the enrollment steps.
Avoid the urge to decline a benefit without explaining to the employee how it works or worse, skipping a benefit because you assume they do not want to enroll in it.
Employees often, but not always, do enroll in some benefits once they hear how each of the benefits work. However, if they still want to decline each benefit option after they hear about it, then that is fine.
It’s your job to take them through a complete enrollment process.
Step 3: Verify the employee
Before you begin entering elections in the benefit enrollment system, make sure that you are working with the right employee’s record.
I personally like to verify TWO pieces of employee information versus just one.
Access the employee in the enrollment system and then verify:
- The last four numbers of the employee’s social security number
- The employee’s date of birth
An alternative to verifying you have the correct employee in the system is to verify:
- The employee’s employee identification number
- The employee’s address
Whichever method that you choose, it’s very important to always make sure that you are verifying you are working in the correct employee’s record. If you don’t, you could easily put the wrong information in on the wrong employee’s record.
I’ve seen it happen and it’s big problem if you have to correct it down the road.
PLUS, do not give the employee the information and ask if it is correct. Instead, ask the employee to give it to you and then cross check in the system. This makes sure that you don’t share other employee’s information by mistake.
Also, employee’s don’t always listen and just say yes that is correct without paying attention.
By providing you with the information and you cross checking that information in the enrollment platform, it’s a much cleaner, more secure process verification process.
Step 4: Confirm the employee’s personal information
The next step is to confirm that rest of the employee’s information is correct in the system.
You will want to confirm the employee’s:
- Spelling of their name
- Gender
- Address
- Date of birth
- Full social security number
- Mobile phone number
- Email address
You’ll often need to indicate whether the employee uses tobacco or not at this stage of the enrollment. You want to make sure that you indicate this or benefits that have tobacco/non tobacco rates won’t populate right in the enrollment system.
Employee’s often move without telling you, change phone numbers and emails or you may just see personal information incorrectly entered into the system.
By confirming this data, you make sure you have current, up-to-date information on each employee.
Here are couple of benefits you get from having clean data:
- ID cards go to the correct address
- You have good contact information if you want to use a texting campaign or send information via mail or email to the employees.
Enrollment time is the best time to clean up this data.
Step 5: Confirm employee’s dependent information
Next, you will want to add or confirm employee dependent information in the system.
Dependents include spouses, domestic partners (if eligible) and eligible children.
To enter dependents, you want to make sure that employee have the following information for each of their dependents:
- Spelling of their dependent’s names
- Dates of birth
- Social security numbers
You’ll want to make sure that employees have this information handy before they sit down to do their enrollment. It’s often forgotten.
It’s a good idea to add dependents to the system even if they do not want to cover them under any benefits. Sometimes, children can be added to some benefits like life insurance and critical illness at little or no cost. If an employee has multiple children, it also might makes sense to add all the children to the system since family rates usually include all children at the same cost.
When entering dependents, if the employee doesn’t have the information with them, do not ever enter FAKE socials or dates of birth. Many benefits are fed the data from your enrollment system and once this fake information is fed to a carrier, it’s very difficult to change.It will cause problems if the employee’s dependents try to use their benefits.
Also, if additional dependent verification is required such as marriage or birth certificates, this is the time to let the employee know what they need to provide, to who and the deadline to provide it.
Step 6: Review each benefit option and how it works with the employee
It’s important to review each benefit with the employee.
You’ll want to review:
- What the benefit is
- What it does
- How it works
- Why people enroll in the benefit
- How much the benefit would be per pay
Many HR and benefits counselors alike will often just ask if the employee is interested in a particular benefit. Asking an employee if they are interested in a benefit typically elicits a “no” answer from the employee.
This does a disservice to the employee who might not understand what they are declining. They may miss out on a guaranteed issue opportunity or you may make a mistake and not see they were currently enrolled in the benefit.
It also does a disservice to your carrier partners who rely on each employee at least hearing how the benefits work to properly spread out the risk across the entire population of employees.
Instead, you want to present each benefit to the employee and then have them make an informed decision based on knowing how the benefit works and how much it is.
Step 7: Confirm each election carefully
At the end of each benefit, re-confirm each election. When you do this, confirm the plan selected, who the employee covered and the payroll deduction amount.
You also want to confirm if an employee declines a benefit option.
Confirming elections at the end of each benefit selection whether they enroll or not, provides greater clarity to the employee and you about what the employee selected.
Step 8: Provide a benefit summary
At the end of the enrollment, you’ll want to provide a copy of the benefit summary that lists each of the employee’s elections and declines for the upcoming plan year.
If you can, you’ll want to print out a copy of the benefit summary and review it line by line with the employee. Once they have reviewed it, have them sign off on the benefit summary. Give one copy to them and keep the signed copy for your file.
This will give you added protection if the employee questions their elections post enrollment.
Alternatively, you can review the benefits one by one verbally with the employee and then send a pdf copy to the employee via email.
Ask them to review this benefit summary and reply to your email that it is correct.
Step 9: Identify items the employee needs to complete to finalize their enrollment
At the end of the enrollment, you’ll want to identify any items that the employee needs to complete to finalize their enrollment.
This could include:
- Dependent verification
- Evidence of insurability requests
It’s important to remind employees if these items are needed to complete their enrollment.
Also, give them a deadline to completed these requirements and let them know what happens if they do not complete these requirements.
Step 10: Provide an opportunity to review and correct benefits
These days, it’s difficult to meet with all employees personally. You may allow self-enrollment, enrollment through benefits counselors onsite and via call center.
Because employee’s may enroll through multiple methods, you can often pull a file from the enrollment platform that has each employee’s benefit summary.
You can distribute these benefit summaries to employees and ask them to review them one last time before the plan year begins. Let them know that no changes can be made after the plan year begins and now is the time to review their benefit elections.
Conclusion
If you follow these steps, you’ll do a much better job enrolling employees in their benefits.
You’ll also have fewer problems post enrollment and your employee’s will have a better understanding of what benefits they enrolled in.
