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For employee benefits management, keep it simple

Posted on June 11th, 2013 Read time: 1 minutes

Advice on employee benefits administration abounds, but the best ideas might be the simplest.

From the standpoint of employee benefits managers, health plans can produce a huge amount of data that is taxing to human resources back office staff. Consider getting health plan reports on an annual rather than a quarterly basis, Employee Benefit News suggests. In addition to cutting down on the amount and frequency of data, this practice can help highlight trends over the long term rather than seasonal fluctuations that might have very little meaning. Truly useful data is also important; make sure that every report contains exactly what is necessary to make decisions about employee benefits.

There are areas of employee benefits administration in which complexity of a certain type cannot be avoided. For example, benefits managers must know how data from health plans translates into common language. This type of concern, however, is easily met. There is no need to complicate it further than learning and using a new vocabulary.

There are solutions for those human resources services professionals who, for whatever reason, cannot simplify their benefits administration or find it overwhelming no matter what. It may be smart to outsource this function to a reliable company.

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