Open Enrollment 2025: Top 5 Tasks for Employers

By: Ariane Silva September 3, 2024

Open enrollment 2025 is coming soon. That means it’s almost time for your employees to review their benefit options and make elections for the upcoming plan year.

These benefits include their medical, dental, and vision insurance; flexible spending accounts (FSAs); life and disability insurance; and more.

Open enrollment is usually a 30-day period, during which employees can evaluate their current benefits, compare the plan options offered by your organization, and choose the benefits that are best for them and their families.

So, what should you and your team be doing to ensure you’re ready for open enrollment 2025? In this post, we’ll take a look at the top five tasks for employers to handle.

Then, we’ll discuss how having a comprehensive software solution can capture and optimize the information you’ll need to ensure a successful open enrollment.

Task 1: Update Your Company’s Benefit Offerings

Open enrollment 2025 provides a great opportunity for you to demonstrate the value you have for your employees. So, you want to be certain the benefit plans you’re offering them are competitive.

According to the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), you should use the time before open enrollment to look within your organization. Survey your employees on “whether offered benefits meet the different challenges faced by a diverse workforce.”

SHRM adds that you should look outside your company as well, to your benefit plan providers: they should offer you “meaningful insights on how employees are using their benefits.” For example, one of your healthcare providers may share data regarding the most popular plan options for a particular age group within your organization, illustrating trends in healthcare preferences and potential gaps in coverage.

This information can help you tailor your benefits package to better meet the needs of your employees, ensuring that the plans offered are relevant and valuable to different demographics within your workforce.

Take the time to connect with benefits providers to collect this information and determine if the packages you’re offering are comprehensive and make necessary changes to them if they aren’t.

Task 2: Set up Contribution Rates & Structure

Whatever your current benefits administration system, now’s the time to determine the contribution amounts for the upcoming plan year; you’ll want to consider employees’ salary, age, ZIP code, and tenure.

This is a critical component of open enrollment. That’s because the Employer Mandate section of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires that healthcare contribution amounts be affordable, as determined by one of the IRS’ three safe harbor provisions; the W-2, Rate of Pay, and Federal Poverty Line. (More about the ACA in task four.)

Be sure to carefully review employee compensation data when calculating contributions rates. Many organizations use employee classification groupings to determine benefit contribution amounts. For example, all registered nurses are in one employee group and subsequently have a set formula for determining contributions.

The important thing to remember here is having a system in place will help in managing and administering benefits in a more organized fashion. A dedicated ERP partner can typically assist with tasks like these.

When setting up the enrollment elections, be sure to also give current employees the option to rollover into their default plan, which is typically the plan they opted into during a previous open enrollment.

Task 3: Simplify the Enrollment Process

If you already have a benefits system and a technology partner, they should be making the enrollment process as simple and straightforward as possible for your employees.

For example, your system should enable your people to view options, compare offerings, and choose plans with ease. Providing easy-to-follow instructions to help employees select the benefits that are best for them, while minimizing confusion and errors.

Also, be sure to respond to any issues reported by employees. One way to simplify this part of the process is to establish a tiered system for help, from answering common questions, up through addressing issues that require high-level intervention.

To provide top-tier support for HR-related business functions, choose a specialized, comprehensive software package, such as Infor Global Human Resources (GHR). It’s the ideal solution for ensuring your organization’s benefits administration and enrollment process is seamless.

Task 4: Review ACA Compliance Requirements

The ACA, which first passed in 2010, introduced sweeping new requirements for employers with 50 or more full-time and full-time equivalent employees.

According to the ACA’s Employer Mandate, organizations must offer their full-time workforce (and their dependents) affordable, minimum essential coverage that also meets minimum value.

Organizations must offer coverage in a timely manner every year, document it for annual IRS reporting purposes, and comply with changing deadlines. This makes open enrollment 2025 an incredibly important time for ensuring compliance with the ACA’s Employer Mandate as this is the time frame for ensuring coverage is sufficient as required by IRS regulations and offered to eligible employees. Unsure if an employee qualifies for health coverage? Make sure you institute one of the two IRS-approved measurement methods.

Also use this time to review your documentation processes, including details pertaining to coverage enrollment, declination, contribution rates, summary of benefits coverage, and anything else you may need to refer to when it comes time to submit the 1094-C and 1095-C forms.

Task 5: Provide Educational Resources

Help employees make informed decisions by providing them with resources that explain their benefits options—detailed guides, FAQs, and access to benefits advisors who can provide personalized assistance.

Be sure to use personalized communications, targeted at various employee types. Effective communication helps build employee confidence in the benefit choices offered.

To help ensure your employees encounter as few roadblocks as possible during open enrollment 2025, provide channels where they can find important information and get assistance. These can include a dedicated phone line, email address, and Slack channel.

It’s also smart to give employees two to three weeks ahead of decision time for them to access information on their options. Taking care with communication will help to minimize confusion and errors.

Bonus Task 1: Put Infor Software to Work

To streamline your open enrollment process, consider leveraging a technology solution such as the Global Human Resources module within Infor HR Talent. This robust platform offers a wide range of features, all designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your HR and benefits operations:

• Automated Enrollment Processes: Automates many aspects of open enrollment, reducing administrative burden and minimizing errors.
• Comprehensive Benefits Management: Provides a holistic view of your benefits offerings, enabling you to manage and update them easily.
• Employee Self-Service: Empowers employees with self-service options, enabling them to review and select benefits on their own time, with all necessary information at their fingertips.
• Compliance Tools: Includes tools to help you ensure compliance with ACA and other regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of penalties.
• Analytics and Reporting: Provides insights into enrollment trends and employee preferences through detailed analytics and reporting tools.
• Scalability and Flexibility: Scales with your organization’s needs, providing flexibility to accommodate changing benefits landscapes.

Bonus Task 2: Get Help from a Proven Technology Partner

As you can see, Infor Human Resources offers extensive functionality. However, to get the most out of the platform, we recommend you implement it with assistance from a proven technology partner, such as RPI Consultants.

When your window for open enrollment 2025 opens, you can be certain it’ll be a busy time for your HR teams, with an enormous amount of coordination required with employees, benefit representatives, and more. Working with RPI, you’ll have your Infor system setup and configured specifically for your company and industry.

You’ll also have the support of a partner who understands the complexities of benefits offerings, and who can help you mitigate the risks of non-compliance with federal and state laws.

RPI has over 25 years’ experience delivering best practices with Infor CloudSuite and other ERP systems. Find out more about how we can help ensure open enrollment 2025 is a success for your employees in particular—and your organization as a whole.