What a year 2020 has been! It is hard to believe it’s drawing to a close already. There isn't a single person who hasn't been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in one way or another this year, and businesses are no exception.

Remember 2018?

Boy how things have changed in a couple of short years. Back in 2018, we published an article on the misperceptions of benefits administration technology in Canada. In that article, we unpacked a study commissioned by HUB International that dug into employer perceptions of employee benefits. In this study, we discovered that “more than 3 of every 4 respondents indicate that [they were] planning to implement one or more cost management strategies in the near future” yet, “only 11% of respondents [planned] to implement a new, or improve an existing, benefits administration technology platform or software solution.” There was an appetite for obvious hard cost savings but not yet a recognition that costs could be dramatically reduced through strategic admin efficiencies.

In that same article, we discussed the technology gap that exists in the world of benefits administration and why employers were not actively considering benefits administration technologies to improve their employee benefits program service delivery.

Fast Forward to Today

Fast forward to today and that technology gap has been closed.

Why? Many organizations, ours included, have been forced to send staff home to work remotely. This is something we never could have predicted and certainly did not plan for. Expected or not, as employers we’ve been left with the task of adjusting our processes to accommodate these evolving work arrangements, trying to keep our teams productive while trimming costs.

Benefits administration has become an obvious candidate for improvement with its time-consuming processes and often paper-driven or manual tasks.

The Year of Digital Admin

2020 has been the year of digital administration for many employers. Whether it is optimizing their benefits programs, their administration technology or both, we have seen a massive shift towards the adoption of technology to solve emerging benefits administration pain points.

Now more than ever employers are looking for solutions that can robustly deliver:

• End-to-end digital employee self-service onboarding
• Digital employee benefits program content delivery
• Efficient digital administration data management
• Hassle-free and cost-effective modular flex and flexible spending account re-enrollments
• HCM integrations that reduce duplicate data entry between systems
• And much more...

Throughout 2020 we have been able to improve on our already established digital administration toolset to better serve both administrators managing remote employees and the remote employees themselves.

Looking Ahead to 2021

While I won’t make the mistake of trying to predict what 2021 has in store for us all, what I do know is that the efficiencies of digital benefits administration are here to stay.

From everyone here at Effortless Admin, we want to wish you and your team a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. Stay safe and take care of yourself, your people and your families.