I suspect you're beginning to see my point about the correlation between the canal and employee benefits. For years, the employee benefits experience didn't change. HR teams struggled to connect employees, carriers and their employer, over hill and dale with little reliable automation. While employees were touted as the organization's "most valuable assets," benefits communications and education seemed intentionally arcane – leading to one report showing that 96% of Americans don't understand insurance terminology.

Not to mention the enrollment experience – one so frustrating that it's been considered more toxic than innocuous. No surprise that research from PlanSource found employees spend an average of just 18 minutes shopping and enrolling in benefits each year – compared to four hours put into buying a new mobile device.

A big part of the problem is the sheer volume of moving parts. Insurance carriers aren't Amazon, and each one has its own way of ingesting data, in some cases requiring double entries, which increases the probability of errors. Without proper automation, benefits management also has long time lags – think of a journey pre-Panama Canal – whereby it can take weeks to make a simple change. Employers don't know what they don't know, so unless discrepancy reports are available, it's hard to intervene on the payroll or employee level.

So, let's talk about employees. Where are they in this quagmire? Here's where they don't want to be: standing in the emergency room at 2:00 in the morning with a feverish, screaming child or having arrived at the dentist for their scheduled appointment to learn their insurance carrier says they're not covered. And that magical moment once a year – affectionately or not, known as open enrollment – is so difficult to navigate, the employee opts for whatever they had before, which inevitably leads to a "gotcha" moment when they learn something previously covered isn't.

No one entity can fix the employee benefits experience on their own. Like building the Panama Canal, it requires consensus among multiple constituents, careful planning and execution, and ongoing maintenance. Without the same consumer-grade technology automating the journey, it's still in bits-and-pieces – apt to succeed in some areas and fail miserably in others. Smooth sailing is always preferable, which is why I recommend asking the following questions:

• Have we formally surveyed our workforce about their employee benefits experience and harnessed the voice of the employee to make improvements?
• Are we auditing benefit-related payroll deductions frequently or waiting for quarterly reports?
• Are we mired in exception management across multiple carriers, having to fit our business to their workflows instead of vice versa?
• Do we consider the employee benefits experience to be a shining star in our digital transformation journey?

There is something to be said for those best-in-class organizations moving toward real-time API integrations between benefits administration systems, insurance carriers, and the greater HR technology landscape. But perhaps the biggest question is personal: what's your employee benefits experience legacy? Are you floating along with the status quo or breaking new ground by creating opportunity? Take the example set by other explorers and champion the experience transformation your employees want to see.

Bradley Taylor is executive vice president of strategic partnerships at PlanSource. He is responsible for building new revenue opportunities, creating strategic partnerships and facilitating the cross-selling of company-wide products, services and capabilities. In 2004, Bradley founded Next Generation Enrollment, a leading provider of benefits administration technology services, which was acquired by PlanSource in 2017. Prior to Next Generation Enrollment, Bradley was a group sales representative at Unum, one of the largest insurance carriers in the world. 

Read more: 

• How automation buys back time and happiness – with Steve Overton
• The role AI and data will play in the 2021 benefits ecosystem
• Stirring the pot: Merging of payroll and benefit platforms creates new challenges, opportunities