Human resources departments no longer have to drown in paperwork. New products are streamlining hiring and benefits processing for smaller firms—and saving money.

Thanks to technology, the tedious struggles with paperwork and year-end enrollment are soon to be a thing of the past.

Call it what you wish: e-HR or virtual benefits. But either way, managing human resources through online products has many law firm administrators excited. And it’s changing the way law firms implement and process employee benefits.

With associate salaries skyrocketing and new hires harder than ever to find, the pressures on administrators to manage budgets and recruit, train, and retain employees are greater than ever. And with a job description that includes, well, just about everything, many administrators are finding that the mountain of paperwork requires an inordinate amount of time and energy.

The larger firms, staffed with technology experts, are already implementing technology for all sorts of employee forms. But solutions for even the smallest firms are just around the corner. In the near future, this new technology will empower these firms to streamline human resources and benefits, achieving time and cost savings, eliminating duplication, verifying invoices, and enhancing employee loyalty.

Welcome to virtual administration. If used correctly, it will streamline your firm’s administration in the following seven ways.
Manage Résumés

Let’s start with an easy one. D.C.’s Wilkinson Barker Knauer has made great strides in technology to keep their local and international attorneys and staff well-connected. Yet one challenge Executive Director Elaine Gregg has is responding to the hundreds of résumés she receives each year. “It’s important to respond to each and every applicant,” she says. In her office, someone types in each person’s information and sends a letter responding to the inquiry. “Automating the process would be a great help,” says Gregg, noting how embarrassing it can be to send two letters to the same person.

Currently, résumés can be scanned into computers and software can easily locate and record the name, address, and phone number. Once in cyberspace, either the human resource department or the hiring partners can review the résumé. Each reviewer can accept the person for an interview, offer a discussion, or reject the applicant—all online.

And when an applicant is rejected, the dreaded letter is sent automatically. Case solved.
Enroll for Benefits Online.

Hiring a new employee is quite a time-consuming process. The paperwork can be overwhelming for even the most organized operation. Many companies have as many as eight points of data entry for various forms, including W-2, health insurance, life insurance, 401(k) or profit-sharing plans, dental plan, vision plan, flexible spending account, and emergency contact information. Not only must all of these forms be completed and sent to the appropriate carriers, the new employee’s information must also be added to the firm’s files for monitoring purposes.

You must admit that it was just a matter of time before the excessive paper trail for a new hire and for open enrollment moved online.

Joan Taylor is one of those who understand the need for virtual administration. “Law firms are struggling with growth, space, time, and money,” she says. As a law firm administrator for over 25 years and now as a consultant, she sees online administration of benefits as the next obvious step for law firms.

The system that Taylor is recommending to her clients, called iBenefits, allows new hires to go online and “instantaneously enroll in benefits with minimal staff involvement.” The process of notifying the payroll department and each benefits carrier, adding the employee’s record to the company’s database, and sending a confirmation to both employer and employee is automated into one step. The paperwork disappears.

An enormous added bonus, according to Taylor, is that “the technology finally gives human resources departments a holiday season.” Instead of administrators and human resource staff working day and night to process all of the paperwork for open enrollment, the iBenefits system enables them to monitor the progress of each employee through open enrollment and to send reminders and updates when necessary. The system’s charts and graphs displaying the enrollment progress should prove a great relief to everyone who has endured this tedious year-end process.

Caveat: A few administrators mentioned that automation has not relieved them of the burden of nagging employees to do their part. No matter how wondrous technology is, it still requires input.
Discard Manuals, Booklets, and Excess Paper

“Forty-four percent of employees find that accessing benefits information is more difficult than filing taxes,” says Michael Seckler, co-founder and vice president, strategic marketing, of Atlanta-based Employease, a company looking to revolutionize online benefits. The manuals describing benefits and listing providers are filled with information that is not applicable to most individuals. Besides, most of us lose the manuals. And from what I have learned, so should you.

Administrator Gregg has put all of this information online. “We want to make it easier to provide help to our employees.” Her firm’s employees go online to review plan descriptions and download lists of providers or specialists. This online process is particularly helpful in communicating benefits to the firm’s international work force.

Carol Tait, a consultant at the D.C. office of the management consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide, recommends placing benefit information on the Internet, as opposed to your firm’s intranet. That way, employees can access the information from home, where important benefits decisions are usually made.

Another benefit to having benefits online is that the information is always current. Health providers are added and deleted from plans almost daily, making any hard copy quickly obsolete. Furthermore, the information can be customized for each individual employee.

And while we’re doing a little house cleaning, another paper trail may soon be eliminated. Many firms with direct-deposit mail the check receipts to employees’ home address.

“Don’t send a paper check, e-mail it,” says Seckler of Employease. Firms using this software send an e-mail confirmation of the deposit and provide employees with a historical record of their paychecks and deductions.
Inform Your Employees of Their True Worth

Administrator Wendy Cartier of Sarasota, Fla.’s Dickinson & Gibbons understands this wave of technology all too well. Recently, she installed software from Employease to help her better manage the firm’s employees benefits.

Like most firms, she has all of her employees’ information in one central database. But with the help of Employease, this database also includes information about each employee’s chosen health benefits, life insurance, disability, vision, dental, retirement plan, and so on.

So what, you say?

Here’s where virtual administration strengthens employee loyalty.

At bonus time, along with a check, she provides each employee with a statement showing how much they were compensated, plus how much the company paid toward all of the aforementioned benefits. “If they’re not happy with the bonus, they realize how much they’re actually getting.”

Cartier has found that once staff members are informed of their true costs and benefits, including Social Security and 401(k) matches, they are more likely to remain than to leave for a slightly higher salary elsewhere.

Wilkinson Barker’s Gregg began communicating benefits and payroll information to the employees at her firm last year and found the process very rewarding. “I think it’s important to let people know what we’re providing. It’s valuable information they never had before,” she says. Employees may better appreciate what the company is doing for them when they see it in a consolidated statement.

Watson Wyatt’s Tait couldn’t agree more. She believes that each human resource action should begin with the question, “How am I going to touch that employee in a way that they feel good about our organization?” She is convinced that young attorneys and staff members want to work for firms that are prepared to provide cutting-edge benefits in ways that make them feel enthusiastic about their firms.
Verify Invoices

Having each employee’s information in one database has another great benefit. According to Cartier, “Since installing the software, our bills are more accurate.” At the end of every month, her Employease system prints out sample invoices, which she then compares with the vendors’ invoices.

Because of the new system, she has caught some mistakes. “A vendor dropped two people’s coverage for no reason.” The costs were being deducted from payroll, but a clerical error on the provider’s part terminated the two employees. With her old spreadsheet system, Cartier admits that she either would not have caught the error, or would have had to fight it months later.

And with the ability to create consolidated benefits reports, budgeting becomes easier for the administrator.
Simplify Termination

It is an unfortunate truth in any business: Staff turnover is constant. And there is nothing more frustrating than the amount of work generated by an employee who is leaving.

Perhaps worse than all the exit paperwork are costly administrative errors. One administrator, who obviously wishes to remain anonymous, remembers finding employees on the firm’s benefit packages who had left the firm six months earlier.

The exit interview and termination of benefits is yet another administrative burden that is soon to be streamlined. “Now when an employee is terminated, Employease will print the HIPPA and COBRA paperwork. Automatically, it shows what type of COBRA plans are applicable,” says Cartier. The system then notifies payroll and every carrier of the termination date. The following month, using the invoice verification, she can then be ensure that the information was received and acted upon.
Redefine the Administrators’ Role

By no means is this wave of technology going to eliminate the need for human resource professionals. Most of those who are promoting this new technology claim that virtual administration will transform human resource professionals from paper pushers into strategic planners.

With this new technology, administrators will be able to function at a higher strategic level and devote more of their time to making sure the firm is becoming more profitable.

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