Navigating through the Latest Trends in HR

Josh Weaver, Head of Digital Ecosystem and Partner Management, Guardian Life

In an interview, Josh Weaver, head of digital ecosystem and partner management at Guardian Life, talks about his views on the challenges facing the HR industry presently.

What are the major challenges and trends impacting the HR industry?

First and foremost, managing benefits has become more complex — and this affects HR teams’ on a day-to-day basis.The decade between 2012 and 2022 saw a 15 percent increase in employees who recognized and were impacted by this increasing complexity.

For example, while companies have made a lot of headway in moving from paper to digital benefits, their systems are still often not fullyintegrated.Ramping up and administeringnew tech tends to be a time-consuming process that can take up to a quarter of employers’ typical work week. Employers also face pressure to rein in benefits costs, ensure legal compliance, and increase productivity while offering affordable benefits that help attract and retain talent.

Then there are newconcerns around talent itself—or how to best support workers’ evolving needs. For example, employers are finding themselves needing to accommodate an increasingly remote workforce. Many employers are trying toaddress these needs by expanding their employee benefits. Still, these new options may be difficult for existing systems to administer — and often, they require increased education and communication for the employees to accurately understand them.

All of this can make for alitany of intimidating challenges, to be sure, but there are solutions.

What kind of progress have you seen around tech use in the HR industry?

Simply put, adoption and investment. More than 70 percent of employers say that their company’s leadership has been more focused on technology benefits since the pandemic, and nearly half of all employers have followed through and already increased their use of benefits techin that time. Between 2017 and 2021, there was a 500 percent increase in venture capital pumped into HR technology, with 2021 alone seeing a $12 billion surge — up from just over $3 billion the year before.

“Real-time connectivity can be a game changer, and API integrations present an opportunity to dramatically improve benefits administration.”

Today, 80 percent of employers have HR and benefits processes that are more digital than paper-based, and many have already seen gains and improvements in efficiency from this shift.This allows HR departments to focus on driving results with their business partners versus dealing with administrative tasks.

What are some of the technological trends that excite you for the future of the HR Industry?

Hands down, application programming interfaces(API) integrations and real-time connectivity address the common challenges of EDI, or electronic data interchange, processes.Most HR departments handle employee data—collecting enrollments, updating eligibility, adding new benefits, and things like that—through EDI processes, which have their drawbacks. Employers run into problems with EDI errors about a quarter of the time, and more than 60% run into problems when they are installing new benefits on their platform.

Employer access to API integrations, which are on the rise, and enable real-time connectivity with insurance carriers, will be a big leap forward in how employee benefits are managed. In 2023, 20% of employers used API platforms, up from 5% four years ago.This sets benefits administrators up for success in a cloud environment, with bidirectional communication and vendor-level integration — meaning less time lost to setup and reconciliation, fewer errors, and real-time communication.

For example, API technology typically reduces plan setup from around 46 hoursto around 10 minutes. Exchanging plan member data goes from five total hours over a couple of weeks to around a minute, and completion and tracking of evidence of insurability go from about seven hours in up to four weeks to, again, around a minute.

What advice do you have for HR leaders who are in the process of re-evaluating their tech strategy?

Look to the future,be knowledgeable about your pain points, and talk to your benefits broker to help develop the right techstrategy for your organization. Think about your organization’s primary goals for reassessing your benefits technology solutions, consider the services you’ll need, andcontextualize for senior leadership the potential efficiency gains you'll experience by adopting API technology. Finally, make sure that all the technologysolutions you are considering can integrate with each other. Even if you select the best carrier, benefits administration, and payroll system, you will not gain the expected benefits if they cannot talk to each other.

The fact is, even before the pandemic, employers needed help with the shift to digital. These days, 35 percent of employers have struggled with creating a benefits technology strategy, and only 25 percent believe that their strategy is as well developed as it could be.The good news is that the solutions are getting more sophisticated all the time. Real-time connectivity can be a game changer, and API integrations present an opportunity to dramatically improve benefits administration.

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