Employees in the HR and benefits departments handle many responsibilities, such as managing a company's health care benefits or supervising the retirement plan. As a result, it’s common for these employees to experience times of overwhelm, stress, and burnout.
It is crucial for plan sponsors, who are frequently overseeing these teams, to understand the difficulties that HR and benefit departments encounter daily, and to avoid compromising their fiduciary duties to these workers.
According to a recent HR Executive study titled "What's Keeping HR Up at Night?" Over 350 HR leaders were surveyed, and 76% of them reported that their level of stress worsened in 2023. Of them, 25% stated the increase was significant. When asked what was causing them stress, many HR directors mentioned having to deal with a larger task with a lack of people or having insufficient resources. Another major stressor was the expectation to "do more with less."
Director of total rewards at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, Rachel Huber Christman, leads the nonprofit’s benefits, compensation, and HR software teams. Considering the scale of the nonprofit, Christman adds that although her teams have expanded over time, the benefits team is still fairly small. According to Christman, the benefits department operated entirely on paper until 2019. As a result, enrollments required individuals to visit the office and complete paperwork. According to Christman, switching to online enrollment has increased productivity and relieved her team of some of the administrative load.
Christman says, “I try to make sure that my team [is not] pushing work-life balance in the way of PTO time.” “Obviously if you can plan for it, that’s even better … When you’re at home, be at home, don’t be thinking about work. One of my senior [colleagues] on compensation often says, ‘Yes, what we do is important—we impact people’s paychecks and their lives with retirement and benefits, but we’re not brain surgeons.’”
Christman stresses that rather than waiting for staff members to approach HR with questions, members of the benefits team should be proactive, meet with employees, and explain the organization's advantages. If Christman notices that some team members haven't taken time off in a while, she encourages them to do so to prevent burnout among the staff.
Christman adds that team members must pay attention to detail and maintain alertness while working. “If you enter a Social Security number wrong or if you don’t understand all the nuances of plan design, it can get us into trouble quickly,” Christman says. “Being very detail-oriented is probably one of the biggest things I like to see in [job candidates].”
Christman adds that in her position as a plan sponsor, she takes care to avoid compromising her fiduciary duty to her team members. “I don’t want fiduciary liability to fall on any of my people,” Christman says. “As far as making fiduciary decisions, I try very hard, especially at the administrator level, to not blur that line … If you are considered a fiduciary, you can be personally held liable … and I wouldn’t want my lower level [employees] to shoulder any of that burden.”
Specific fiduciary responsibilities should be spelled out in both the plan document and the appointing resolutions, according to T. Rowe Price's "Fiduciary Guide." T. Rowe suggests that plan sponsors should review committee charters, resolutions, plan documents, and other plan governance documents if there is any confusion about who oversees what. They should also create a detailed list of all plan management and administrative activities that separate fiduciary from non-fiduciary activities.
Examples of non-fiduciary duties were outlined in the Fiduciary Guide. These included creating employee communications, figuring out benefits, handling benefit claims, and informing members of their rights and obligations under the plan.
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