Open Enrollment The New Hire
b'Marty here with Warehouse and Operations as a Career, I hope everyone\\u2019s had a prosperous, safe and productive week so far? You may be noticing quite a bit of activity out in your warehouses over the next 2 weeks, inventory control may be finishing up with those yearly cycle counts, oh and several industries will be experiencing those last minute audits on sanitation programs and customer reviews of their products. And we\\u2019ve been busy here at WAOC as well. I\\u2019m really excited about our next couple of programs. Next week we plan on having a few great guest on the show to discuss their planning and goals and share their advancements over 2018. The next week it\\u2019s looking like we\\u2019ll be talking with the old WAOC gang for our 4th Quarter Roundtable too. There I go getting all side tracked again, but be sure to plan on checking in with us next week, I think you\\u2019ll enjoy all of our guests! OK, so I was working with a few individuals this week, existing employees, and all three of them was asking me who they needed to see about changing something in HR. One man had had a baby and was asking about open enrollment and what it meant. He was needing to of course add his new daughter to his insurance. Two other associates had asked me about changing their W4\\u2019s or adjusting their tax information. I wasn\\u2019t much help to any of them, but I was able to get them pointed in the right direction and get\\u2019em some help. I hadn\\u2019t thought much about it but it is that time of year, this is when we should make any adjustments with our benefits and deductions, it all kind of goes along with our 2019 planning and goals.
\\nSo we\\u2019ve probably all heard about open enrollment over the last month or so, Open Enrollment is usually about our health insurance. It\\u2019s that one time each year that we can make adjustments to our policy for absolutely no reason at all. Throughout the year, and there\\u2019s a few exceptions I guess, but usually it takes a life change of some sort to change our policy. Something like a child birth, or a loss of a family member, maybe divorce or a marriage, something along those lines. But during open enrollment we can easily decrease or increase our coverage and make those kinds of changes. I had an employee working for me once that fell into the open enrollment trap. He\\u2019d had a baby in like June and just never thought of letting HR know and there was something like a 30 day grace period he\\u2019d missed. He was told in August that he\\u2019d need to add him during that years open enrollment. We\\u2019ll he forgot to make changes that December and it was the following year before his daughter could be added to his insurance. In most instances there\\u2019s nobody that can help us, even our employers may not be able to intervein on our behalf. I tried everything, I spoke with my corporate office and the insurance rep for our company but wasn\\u2019t able to get the rules bent even a little.
\\nAnother thing we may want to take a look at is our weekly deductions. Things like the number of dependents we claim, our direct deposits, maybe we could increase the dollar amount we send to savings each week? Think of all this as an opportunity to get things in order at the end of the year! If you have any concerns or questions, I\\u2019m certain your HR department can help you out.
\\nWe\\u2019ve talked about how important our on-boarding and new employee orientations are, how we need to be prepared to have all this information with us, especially our insurance needs and deductions all together. It\\u2019s just a little of that employee responsibility, our responsibilities as new associates, to our employers and our families, right?
\\nSpeaking of being a new employee, I was speaking with a gentleman out on the floor last week about his new job. He\\u2019d only been working for 3 days and was still in training. I think we all know that queasy feeling we have being the new guy. Not only have we walked into a place we\\u2019ve never been in before,'