The push to go paperless isn’t even a question anymore for agents working with employers in a remote-office environment. But how to go paperless isn’t the only question popping up…

“We’ve always had our employee benefit open enrollment meeting in the fall and it’s in the lunchroom. Now what do we do?”

“Our employees fill out paper forms, but now they’re working remotely. How do I get that form?”

“I used to do my new hire interviews one-on-one. How should I do that now?”

“How do I document COVID training? Temperature checks? Assigning out a laptop as a remote asset?”

GRA Benefit Group’s Mike Ramsby was recently featured in a live interview to share answers to these questions and more. Hear how cloud-based systems like 1Enroll are helping agents go paperless while also lowering administration costs in his interview on Expert Connexions.

Click to watch the full interview

Interview Transcript

Julie Holton: Welcome to Expert Connexions. I’m Julie Holton, the founder and principal strategist of mConnexions Marketing Agency. We are connecting you to experts in our community with resources and opportunities to help us as we navigate through this new normal of COVID19. Today, we’re going to talk about some pretty big changes impacting the state of Michigan and insurance agents, employers all throughout the entire state. Joining me is Mike Ramsby of GRA Benefits Group. Mike and his team provide solutions for employee benefit agents and their clients. Mike, I know this is your busy time of year. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

Mike Ramsby: My pleasure. My wife and I always… We watch the news at night and we’re saying, “Geez, that person wore the wrong shirt.” Now I’m worried I wore the wrong shirt for this television interview.

Julie Holton: (laughing) Your shirt looks good! Right? No worries there. So Mike, you have been in this industry for more than 30 years with GRA Benefits Group, and never in that time have you experienced a global pandemic. None of us have experienced this before. So talk to me about, first, what has been the biggest impact on you and your clients?

Mike Ramsby: Well, for me, I wasn’t a hand sanitizer guy. I figured, “Hey, I can beat whatever comes to me and let me build up my immunity.” Well, now I’m using hand sanitizer every five minutes. So, that’s one of them. I would use Subway and Jimmy John’s and I would go there in person. Well, now I use the Subway app. I would never have thought of using the app. Why would I use the app? I can go there and they make it fresh in front of me. Well, now I’m using the Subway app.

Mike Ramsby: For a while, I thought Ship It was slang for something else, but it’s really a service that is quite beneficial for you as well. But with that, I had some bad experiences. I had a time in Gaylord where you’re supposed to have curbside pickups and they never came to the curb. They were serving the inside clients. It gets me thinking, it really frames customer service and what you think about them. Have they adapted to this and are they putting their customer first?

Mike Ramsby: And then I’ve got a freshman in college. They’re on person learning and remote learning. So, that’s a challenge. I’ve got a sophomore in high school, that’s remote learning and it’s not working out for her, but we’re trying to figure out ways to do that. But all in all, we’re healthy and we’re doing our part to keep our community safe.

Julie Holton: And so important to mention that first, Mike, because obviously, we have you on today to talk about… You’re an expert in your field, but you’re also dealing with all of these changes on a personal level too. So you can really relate to what your clients are going through and what our community is going through.

Mike Ramsby: Yeah. For GRA, we were deemed an essential business, so we didn’t have to go to remote working, but we chose to because we could, and we stayed in remote… well, Phase Four. And then after Phase Four… You know, remote work has a cost to it, from an admin side for the employer, there’s a cost to it and I’m still paying rent and so forth.

Mike Ramsby: So we looked at it, made sure it was safe. Everyone can be six feet apart. So we’re all wearing masks when we’re traveling in between our offices. We have cleaning schedules, I switched some door knobs out to push, so there’s less contact. I never would’ve thought of that unless there was a pandemic. We’re in the employee benefit business. So unfortunately, in a pandemic, everyone wants health insurance. So, business is good.

Mike Ramsby: That’s an unfortunate thing. Also, for about three years now, we’ve been helping employee benefit agencies and their clients move HR and BenAdministration to the Cloud. So that business has taken off as well. We’ve been very busy in that. Coincidentally earlier in the year, before COVID hit, ur schedule was to move all of our files to SharePoint. So everything’s in the Cloud.

Mike Ramsby: Well, that paid off because when we went remote, we were basically, the next day, ready to go remote. We didn’t really have to do anything because all of our apps and everything, and our file structures, that was the last thing was in the Cloud. And earlier in the year, again, back in January, I was looking for a way to reward employees. These anniversaries and birthdays came up and I found an app called Bonusly.

Mike Ramsby: And that was nice, when they were remote, because in Bonusly, everybody can give points to everybody and then they can cash them in for gift cards or whatever, or order things. So it was a nice thing when we were remote to kind of have that, still have a personal touch, if you will, to know that, “Hey, I’m thinking of you and value you,” basically.

Julie Holton: Wow, what a great way to stay connected and to really help your employees during that time, especially early on when Michigan first initiated that statewide shut down. There’s so many uncertainties. I mean, still we have uncertainty, but we’re kind of in this new rhythm a little bit, but back then, gosh, we didn’t know how long we’d be working remotely. So what a great way. What’s the name of the app called again?

Mike Ramsby: Bonusly.

Julie Holton: Bonusly. Okay. Very cool.

Mike Ramsby: It’s pretty interesting. Obviously there’s a little fee to it, but it’s worth it, we found. For our clients though, our clients that we service, and particularly the employers, the admin side, it was just adjusting to a new norm. You know, I’ve got furloughs and layoffs and hiring back people. How do my employees benefit? How are they affected by all of that? Some of the carriers didn’t have things set up for that. So we had to walk them through that and help them get to that.

Mike Ramsby: Some of the employers were like, “Hey, we’ve always had our employee benefit open enrollment meeting in the fall, and it’s in the lunch room. Well now what do we do?” You know, or, I’ve always had employees fill out paper forms. How do I get that form? I did my new hire, my interviewing of my new hires one-on-one. How do I do that now? How do I document my COVID training? How do I manage my remote assets when I give someone a laptop? How do I know that I don’t forget what I termed them to remember that that laptop was there? How do I manage that? Documenting the employees temperature. If I want to keep a history of documentation that I did this, how do I handle that? And overall, how do I adapt to a remote workforce?

Mike Ramsby: On the client’s benefits side, telemedicine. Telemedicine. We got a lot of calls of clients saying, “Hey, what’s telemedicine and do I have that benefit?” Well, a lot of them have had that benefit for three, four, five years. They just never knew about it and never felt a need to use it. Obviously it came in pretty handy during COVID. And even without COVID, my staff has used telemedicine because, maybe it’s late at night and there’s an ear infection, and rather than calling a doctor or rushing to the urgent care, they can just try the telemedicine and see that.

Mike Ramsby: Or when they’re at work and they’re not feeling well or something like that, maybe they use the telemedicine. So that’s really been a difference maker or change overall. I think the doctors are starting to adapt to it as well. I think before this, doctors were not interested in it. It was another thing that they had to do, technology wise, ’cause they’re inundated with so much new technology. They’d rather not do it. But I think now that they’re learning that they’ll still get paid the same office call visit that they would’ve gotten paid if they came in.

Mike Ramsby: But as a person… And I’ve used it as well, I think you have to watch it and manage it because you can’t replace a doctor seeing you, feeling you, touching you. That can’t be replaced during telemedicine. So you kind of have to balance it. If you’re on a cholesterol medicine and you’ve done your blood test and you feel fine, then yeah. Maybe telemedicine to reorder the script. But it’s a gray area there. I think we have to figure that out and hopefully it’ll get better for everybody, not just the patients. With the doctors as well.

Julie Holton: Absolutely. And we have a comment here from Stephanie who says, “Telemedicine has been amazing, so helpful through all of this.” So true. Dealing with, of course, this pandemic, dealing with COVID 19. Mike, and you’re talking about the benefits side too. And it is interesting to hear you talk through all of these questions that you’ve been able to help your clients answer, because so much of this you were already doing with your team, or helping to navigate through.

Julie Holton: But I want to ask you about one thing. Talking about paperless, I know there’s got to be a big push right now, because we see it in so many industries, to go paperless. And what does this mean for the employee benefits world. Earlier, you mentioned that GRA moved file structures to the Cloud prior to the pandemic. So how does moving Benefit Admin to being paperless, help employers, especially right now?

Mike Ramsby: Well, think about the Subway app. I’m using the Subway app. Now, what I realized is that I can order, I can do it on my phone, I can go to my favorites, so it’s there. I just hit favorites and then boom, and send it. I get there, it’s ready. I just go in, pick it up and leave. So what I realized is my time is valuable. If I look at my hourly rate, I’m saving on my hourly rate by using that app. So the same can be true for Benefit Administration. Benefit Administration for employers, it’s not about sales. That’s the sexy part, sales and profits, but if you lower your internal admin costs, you can increase your revenue. So taking a look at that and saying, hey, in employee benefits, is there costs that we can reduce and gain efficiencies for?

Mike Ramsby: And that’s the biggest thing in employee benefits in moving them to online. I mean, certainly you’ll have your employee data available. And the integrity of it is there, so that when the employee puts in their social number on the new hire app, you know that that’s a seven, not a one. And there was no missed communication there, when you send it off to the carrier as well.

Mike Ramsby: I’ve used it where, hey, I’ve got a performance review, a salary review. Well, what have I done over the last five years for salary? It’s all there. It’s documented. It’s in one place. The history is there. The W-4. People with COVID have been changing their W-4s. Well, how do I document that? How do I know what they have? I-9. All that being documented. Your expense alignments. Benefits are expensive.

Mike Ramsby: Health insurance is expensive, but not a lot of people spend time adjudicating bills or making sure that the right employees are on the bill. Did that person get term from the health plan? Did the new hire get on the plan? All of that happens in a BenAdmin world, online. Compliance. Did I comply with Cobra? Did the new hire, when I brought them on, did they sign the remote work policy? Voluntary benefits. You know, people are wanting voluntary benefits like life insurance, especially in a pandemic. Or pet insurance. We’re seeing that becoming very popular, but employers, justifiably so, resist that because it’s more administration for them.

Mike Ramsby: But if you do it online, the administration is very, very minimal. So it’s overall being accessible as well, wherever you are. So when you do go remote or have to go remote, it’s all there. But even so without that, you can say that there’s a lot of benefits above and beyond that.

Julie Holton: So interesting, because for sure, being able to access the information from anywhere is so important right now. We know a lot of offices do not have everyone back in, or maybe they’re working kind of a hybrid schedule. I know some people are just allowing employees to continue working from home at this point, indefinitely. So making sure that workers can stay connected to each other, employers with their employees. Mike, there’ve been so many challenges with COVID. How are you able to help your clients really face these challenges?

Mike Ramsby: Well, the moving to an online world, who has the time? Because it does take some time in getting to that. But what we do is, we do it all for you, so we do all of that.

Julie Holton: I like the sound of that!

Mike Ramsby: Yeah. And so with our expertise of being in the business for over 30 years, we know how to do it. We know how to make it easy on our clients as well. And the end is that enrollments are done virtually. So imagine, you do your hiring through some type of virtual system, if you will. Once you’ve hired that employee, even before their actual start date, you could send them a link. And through the link, they get to learn about the employee benefits, they get to see your employee manual and read through that, they maybe do some training that’s required, maybe COSHH training or safety training or COVID training.

Mike Ramsby: All of that can be done. And the employee that puts in their information, their address, their [inaudible 00:14:49] they even select their benefits. So all of that can be done virtually and painlessly for the HR person or the BenAdmin people within the employer. If you have to term them, then the employer just hits a button and it that’s it. We get the information and we process the termination for them. They don’t have to do anything.

Mike Ramsby: And the biggest challenge we always see is, through employers with more than 20 employees, they’ll hire somebody and not send out the COBRA notice that’s required. So it takes care of that. The employee confidentiality agreement. It can be done electronically and signed electronically, so that it’s documented. So you don’t forget any type of compliance or something that you should be doing in your new hire process.

Mike Ramsby: It can integrate with payroll as well. So the integration with payroll reduces steps. So you don’t have to worry about data in one system getting to another system. Basically, you have an online HR database, so it’s no paper and one-stop shopping. Like I said, yeah, we do all the work. We get the file, maybe a payroll document from the employer, we get the carrier bills, and we go through that and we get it up and running for them. We help them with all of that. And then we’re there ongoing. So if they have any challenges or need to set up their open enrollment, we’re there for them to walk through that as well.

Julie Holton: Okay. So, streamlined and efficient sounds amazing, but it also sounds expensive. Mike, let’s talk numbers.

Mike Ramsby: Well, when I personally first got into this business was in 2000. And back then it was expensive. No doubt about it. And I had a hard time getting employers and employee benefit agents to use that. Since that time, it’s really proliferated, where now, it’s not just for the big boys. Small employers are using us. Basically, nowadays, the software is free. You’re basically paying for the labor of setting up the system and maintaining.

Mike Ramsby: So on average, you look at about $3 per employee per month with a minimum about $50 a month, is what you’re looking at. But, the carriers are realizing that if they have an employer on the system, they’re getting better data, and they’re actually maybe getting a little bit more revenue because when an employer hires somebody and you have employer-paid life insurance, you may forget to add that person to the employer-paid life insurance, because it’s not coming out of the employee’s paycheck. So those carriers have realized, “Geez, maybe I’ll throw in some money to these BenAdmin systems because it will help our revenue.” And of course it’s a downstream effect to the employer as well.

Julie Holton: Wow. I mean yes, there’s a cost associated to it, but I imagine there’s also in the long run of savings as well. What are some of the biggest challenges that your clients face when they’re moving to an online benefit admin system?

Mike Ramsby: Well, it’s gathering their data, because their data is everywhere. Excel spreadsheets, one, two, three, four and five, so that’s the biggest thing is gathering their data. But then we have tricks to help them out. If they can get us a feed from their payroll system, and then if they can give us access to their carrier systems, we have tricks to get the data out and then into the system. And then we do payroll and carrier audits.

Mike Ramsby: So we’ll audit their payroll to see what the deductions are, and we’ll audit the carriers to make sure that the bills are right. And what we found is that people have had someone on the life insurance bill for eight months, and they were termed eight months ago. So we’ll save them a little bit money there, or they’re doing a payroll deduction wrong and they didn’t realize that. So we’ll help them out there in terms of that. Basically, it’s gathering the data, getting the data. That’s the biggest challenge for them. And like I said, we have some tips and tricks to help them through that.

Julie Holton: We have a great question that’s come in, let me put this up on the screen here. See if we can get it all from your personal kind of point of view here. Mike, do you think businesses will maintain some of these safer protocols, even when someday COVID isn’t the threat that it is now? For example, will these new digital practices be maintained at GRA Benefits and then what might change or return to the previous protocol?

Mike Ramsby: Well, I think masks. I think masks will probably be the first thing that everyone will burn, perhaps. The cleaning schedule that I have, I think it makes sense. In fact, I’m supposed to get the doorknob cleaned around this time. So if you hear somebody… But I think that makes sense, especially with flu season coming up. I don’t think those types of things will change.

Mike Ramsby: I think the masks will go away. And I don’t see our clients going back to… I don’t think we’ve ever had a client, once we got them an online BenAdmin, move back. You know, they stay there and they’ve grown it. A lot of them just get the BenAdmin going, and then they’re starting to realize, “Well, geez, I can do HR in the system as well. I can have employee documents in the system, and everything maintained online in the Cloud for me.” And it’s all safe. It’s secure. There’s two two-step multi-factor authentication as well. Other than the masks, I don’t see much going back.

Julie Holton: So from a digital perspective, it makes sense. I think this perhaps will be the push that some people needed to continue to move forward. And we’re not going to see anyone go back. No one’s getting rid of their computers anytime soon. So great question, Stephanie.

Mike Ramsby: Yeah. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes something like this to get people to change their habits. I mean, I’m using the Subway app. I never would have used the Subway app unless this happened. So, maybe a silly example, but I think it hits home and that’s an example, and I think the same thing with looking at other systems. Sometimes you need some type of earthquake thing to get you to look at it, because the systems have been around a long time. It’s just no one’s wanted to do it, or didn’t think it was for them, or thought it was too costly.

Julie Holton: Well, and I think on the flip side too, our clients are now expecting more of us. They’re expecting virtual meetings, for instance, they’re expecting paperless. And so some of these changes that you said have been much needed are going to continue to be driven from the client.

Mike Ramsby: Yep, yep, yep, exactly.

Julie Holton: Okay. Mike, where can employers learn more? Because I know you’ve touched on, you’ve answered all of our questions. I really appreciate that, but where can people find out more information?

Mike Ramsby: Well, I’d start with their employee benefit agency. Start there, see what they’re doing, see what they have. If there’s nothing there, then have the employee benefit agent call us, or they can call us directly and we’ll hook back around to the employee benefit agent. Mike at GRA Benefits, grabenefits.com is who we are. That’s probably the easiest one.

Julie Holton: Excellent Mike Ramsby of GRA Benefits Group. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Mike Ramsby: My pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you.

Julie Holton: Okay. And for all of you watching, you can catch this replay, you can catch all of our interviews in this Expert Connexion series right here on Facebook or mConnexions.com. We’ll see you next time.