10min
Each year, dozens of new studies are released covering nearly every aspect of the employee benefits industry. Whether it's data on the adoption of new technologies, or which benefits employees truly want, our comprehensive list of benefits stats will give you a quick overview of the benefits and HR tech industry as a whole, and perhaps help you with your next report.
Manual Processes in HR
- Tedious administrative tasks take up 73.2% of HR's time. (Center for Effective Organizations)
- Manually enrolling an employee in benefits costs $110 on average vs self-enrolling online which costs under $22. (Smart Business Network Inc.)
- When employees do their own benefits administration online, it results in a 15% time savings by HR staff. (Smart Business Network Inc.)
- HR managers who do not fully automate say they lose an average of 14 hours a week manually completing tasks that could be automated; more than a quarter (28%) waste 20 hours or more, and 1 in 10 (11%) spend 30 hours or more. (CareerBuilder)
- The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that 56% of all tasks human resources departments perform can be automated with existing technologies. (McKinsey)
- HR managers who do not fully automate say manual processes have led to:
- Lower productivity: 41%
- More errors: 40%
- Higher costs: 35%
- Poor candidate experience: 18%
- Poor employee experience: 17%
- Less engagement: 17%
- Poor hiring manager experience: 11% (CareerBuilder)
Errors in Manual Processes
- On average, 3.6% of invoices have errors. While this percentage appears low as a percent of total annual spend, this can be significant for certain companies. Best practice organizations drive the error rate below 1%. (API Outsourcing)
- Aberdeen Group suggests there is a 12-15% carrier error-rate in manual billing (Aberdeen Group)
- Research data shows that automating benefits enrollment enables companies to reduce time spent in administrative tasks by 50% and drop error rates less than 1%, and save $500,000 (approximately) after moving from paper-based to a technology platform. (Empxtrack)
Paper Use in Business
- Despite employers’ desire to shift away from paper, the pace of digitalization has stalled with just 31% of employers reporting that they’re mostly digital in 2020 — the same as 2017. (Guardian)
- Sustainability isn’t the only reason to evaluate a company’s paper usage. For example, just looking for paper files can take as much as 40% of an office worker’s time. (Formstack)
- The average organization spends $20 per paper to file it, $120 searching for each lost document, and $220 in the recreation of the document. (eFileCabinet)
- An average of 4 weeks is lost each year waiting on misfiled, mislabeled, untracked, or lost documents. (Gartner)
- According to Gartner, workers spend between 20 and 30% of their workweek managing documents or document-based information. That’s about 12 hours of a 40-hour workweek. (SentricHR)
Current HR Technologies
- 47% of companies have HR software that is over seven years old. (Bersin by Deloitte)
- 33% of companies have 10+ HR systems. (Bersin by Deloitte)
AI in Benefits Technology
- 38% of enterprises are already using AI in their workplace with 62% expecting to use it by 2018. (Personnel Today)
- Nearly 40% of companies are using some form of AI in HR alone. (frevvo)
- A survey of HR executives by IBM found that 46% believe AI will transform their talent acquisition capability and 49% believe it will transform their payroll and benefits administration. (Personnel Today)
- More than 1 in 10 HR managers (13%) are already seeing evidence of artificial intelligence (AI) becoming a regular part of HR, and 55% say it will be in the next five years. (CareerBuilder)
- Research firm IDC predicts that the market for AI will grow from $12.5 billion in 2017 to $46 billion by 2020, impacting all business practices across almost every industry. (AI Business)
Embracing Benefits Technology
- A majority of employers have increased their spending on benefits-related technology in the past ten years, with more than 50% expecting further increases in the next three years. (Guardian)
- One out of three employers indicate that they would recommend switching to a carrier that offered real-time connectivity, new benefits technology that is likely to take employee experience to the next level and help boost stalled digitalization efforts. (Guardian)
- HR technology focus through 2022 includes 45% intelligent automation or process automation and 48% employee experience/ portal layers. (PWC)
Stats on Employees + Benefits
- 20% of employees say they don't keep up with benefits correspondence (e.g., they don't attend company benefits meetings, don't read their summary plan descriptions or they file/throw benefits materials away unread). (SHRM)
- Roughly one-third of workers are only somewhat satisfied with the benefits offered by their current employer, and 20% are not satisfied. (SHRM)
- More than one-half (55%) prefer online enrollment methods versus just 16% who prefer a paper method. (SHRM)
- 80% of surveyed HR employees found that using HR technologies improved employee attitude toward the company. (G2)
- Over 70% of employees feel that the importance of new benefits will continue to grow over time. (Paycor)
- According to the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute, nearly one-third of employees would like their employers to provide online benefits selection and decision-support tools. (EBRI)
- When EBRI asked, "They next time your company has open enrollment, how would you like them to communicate and provide information to you," employees' responses included:
- An online portal for selecting benefits (36% of respondents).
- An online tool that helps you make decisions about your benefits (35%). (EBRI)
* * *
These statistics help uncover the importance of technology in both HR and organizations as a whole. It is clear that work tech is becoming more prevalent in helping organizations streamline processes and will only continue to be on the rise in the coming years, especially in relation to HR and benefits processes. We hope this provides you with some insight as to how automation and technology can support HR and benefits and help to alleviate some of the frustration caused by manual and dated processes.
