Purpose

As an employee, before the next benefits year starts, your organisation will open some (or all) of your existing Flexible Benefits for you to make changes for the coming benefits year. This is typically a two-week to three-month period, and is known as annual, or open enrolment. You use Employee Self Service (ESS) to complete the annual enrolment process.

As an employer, the annual enrolment process provides services that your employees use to manage their benefits independently online. By making Employee Self-Services (ESS) available to employees on your company's intranet, you can reduce the volume of enquiries and forms that need to be handled by your benefits administrators. Employees have continual access to up-to-date information about their benefits, and any changes they make are immediately effective. The integration of data entered online therefore enables you to increase cost-efficiency and guarantee accuracy of data.

Process Flow

The Flexible Benefits (GB FlexBens) Annual Enrolment process will obviously reflect your organisation’s particular requirements. An example of a generalised GB FlexBens Annual Enrolment process is described below.

For each new benefits year, in the pre-annual enrolment period, the organisation defines how benefits will be funded and which benefits are to be provided to which employees. Subsequently, the Benefits Administrator contacts all relevant benefits providers and negotiates terms and rates for the required benefit plans for the upcoming benefits year.

Prior to the open enrolment period, the Benefits Administrator carries out the following tasks, to ensure employees are aware of the benefits they are entitled to in the new benefits year:

Enrols core benefits for employees, which cannot be changed during the annual enrolment period

Enrols standard benefits for employees, for example, life insurance to the value of four-times basic salary

Assigns the Open Enrolment offer for eligible groups of employees

Using Employee Self-Service (ESS) for GB FlexBens Annual Enrolment, eligible employees can view the core benefits which have been assigned to them, amend the standard benefits offered and select any additional Flexible Benefits plans on offer.

The full range of functions available to employees when using the GB FlexBens ESS service is described in Flexible Benefits Enrolment Administration , under Features .

For any individual employee:

He or she can choose to accept only the standard benefits package offered by the organisation.

If the value of the employee’s benefit choices is less than the value of the -standard package, the employee under-spends and this employee credit can be added back into the employee’s post-flex salary.

If the value of the employee’s choices is greater than the standard package (and the rules of the scheme permit this), the employee over-spends and this employee cost is deducted from the employee’s post-flex salary.

Once satisfied with their choices, employees submit their selected benefits plans using ESS.

After an employee has submitted his or her benefits choices via ESS, assuming that the correct effective dates were set prior to annual (open) enrolment, the selected benefits plans are automatically active when this effective date becomes the current system date.

If available in ESS, employees can print a statement of their benefits choices.

Employees’ master data and compensation and benefits statement are then automatically updated in the GB FlexBens system after the enrolment process is completed.

The Benefits Administrator submits employees’ benefit choices (with all necessary additional data) to the respective benefits providers.

Providers confirm ability to supply the required benefits and issue invoices to the organisation, as necessary.

There are no additional mandatory enrolment tasks for the Benefits Administrator other than those mentioned in process steps 1-8. The aim of the enrolment component for GB FlexBens is to minimize the administration load by offering enrolment via ESS.

For most organisations offering Flexible Benefits schemes, approval checks for employees’ benefits choices are not normally implemented, except for any plans which have a direct impact on the organisation, for example, annual holiday.

If desired, your Benefits Administrator could also send each individual employee a statement confirming their benefit choices made in ESS, as part of an optional confirmation process. Assuming the statement is sent out while the annual enrolment period is still open, employees would then be able to log back into ESS and amend their own choices. Again, this is an optional stage in the enrolment process.

Result

Following the annual enrolment process:

Example

A male employee receives a Pre-Flex salary of GBP 25,000.

His organisation implements a No Additional Funding Scheme for the upcoming benefits year, and provides private medical insurance as the single core benefit, and the following standard benefits:

In the November before the start of the new benefits year, the organisation opens annual enrolment of benefit plans for the following benefit year. The employee makes some changes to his standard benefits plan for the next year. He buys an extra five days holiday at a cost of GBP 500, and changes his dental plan to Premier Cover, costing an extra GBP 150 per year as compared with the standard plan. His new benefits selections are as follows:

The employee has now increased his level of benefits above the core/standard levels funded by the organisation. As a result, his Post-Flex salary is calculated as follows:

Post-Flex salary =Pre-Flex salary – cost of additional holiday – cost of increased dental cover.

Post-Flex salary = 25,000 – 500 – 150

= GBP  24,350.