Benefits administration hub with carrier-feed reconciliation

I am within my first year of being a benefits coordinator [United States] still and we are moving from using a benefits administrator (Empyrean) to administering benefits in house. I wanted to see if anyone had any like what to expect type things or tips for anyone that already does benefits in house or have moved from one of another. I can imagine it'll probably be a little miserable just because it makes things more manual and hectic, but I am excited to learn more since I really didn't before because we weren't hands on. Just any suggestions would be appreciated. Read more

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this situation. We have a benefits admin that manages our open enrollment, including reviewing the markets to ensure we're competitive, the presentation to staff, and manually entering in enrollments into the providers websites. They have been doing this for five years without any issues. They are the only benefits admin doing this work. This past open enrollment they had some personal things going on (a close family member was going through chemo), but there were a few mistakes. One employee wasn't enrolled in the correct network, but was corrected within 20 days. Another employees' new dependent was not enrolled correctly either, and wasn't found out for a month. (The employee had been on leave prior to open enrollment, so the dependent issue was found during open enrollment). We're conducting an investigation into the dependent issue, because the employee states they had issues with their insurance during their leave. The benefits admin states they were not aware there was an issue and enrolled the dependent once the employee returned from leave as is the usual process. The HR director wants to withhold an annual increase from the benefits admin for the mistake. As an HRBP, I don't see a pattern of poor performance so don't want to recommend that course. But I'm curious how others might see this. Our approach has always been to give annual increases, unless there has been ongoing issues with performance. Our investigation isn't complete, and I've asked the HR Director to pause any decisions until it has been, but they are already taking steps towards that end. Have you ever put someone on a PIP, or corrective action for a situation like this? Read more

We finally got the green light to put out an RFP for a new benefits administration platform. We've outgrown our current vendor and we've had way too many issues with automation, manual processing, call center deficiencies, etc. Our brokers are solid and I'm confident that they're going to present us with decent options, but thought I'd tap some experts in here who either love or hate their current setup and can offer some thoughts on what's worked and what hasn't worked. Background on my org: 45k+ EEs, 36k+ benefit-eligibles. We're a healthcare system, so we have lots of variation in tech-savviness among our employee population. Using a module in our HRIS is not an option. We currently use one vendor for eligibility files, enrollment processing, COBRA, direct billing, spending accounts (FSA and commuter), year-round call center, online benefits portal, and ACA tracking/forms/filing. Looking for a similar one-stop shop for all of the same services that can also handle voluntary benefits enrollment and premium processing. I'm exhausted just thinking about all of this. We might be able to convince the bean-counters to let us spend big money on something like Alight, especially since we currently use them for LOA management. I'm going to be continually reminding them that this type of vendor is not one where you just get the cheapest one (because you often get what you pay for). So tell me, fellow benefits nerds, who should I look at and who should I steer clear of? Read more