Employee Benefit Tips for Employers of Excellence

1. There is no silver bullet out there that defines the perfect benefits plan. One needs to look at your complete company individual benefit objectives, prioritize the different objectives, and design a plan that meets your overall objectives and affordability without breaking the company bank.
   
   
2. Review your benefits including objectives, design, cost, usage, and benchmark on a regular basis.
   
   
3. Think before you cut back on benefits. Remember that benefits attract the best employees and better employees lead to fewer employees (in addition to more productive and profitable employees). Keep a big picture or longer range forecast when deciding on whether to trim, or add benefits, or transfer costs to employees. Avoid making rash decisions and if you are trimming some benefits or increasing employee´s share of the cost, try and give at least ½ year´s notice to employees.
   
   
4. With the benchmark mentioned in #2 above, look at what your major competitor´s are offering in benefits and strive to be slightly higher than the average. (Unless your plan objective is to be the best or in the top quartile, etc.)
   
   
5. Try and promote employees to be more healthier. This can be accomplished through design changes such as implementing Consumer Health Driven Plans, implementing or focusing on wellness programs, and implementing direct incentives for employee´s following healthy life-styles and practices.
   
   
6. If you haven´t already eliminated your defined benefit plan, make sure that you fund it sufficiently. Try and make recommended contributions, instead of minimum contributions, as directed by the plan´s actuary wherever possible. This will help level your plan´s contribution needs over time and attempt to avoid huge spikes in funding requirements. Remember the defined benefit approach generally provides superior benefits to long-term employees.
   
   
7. Offer a 401(k) plan with at least a 100% match of some level of employee contributions. Since whatever the employer match there is the same as a 100% return on that employee contribution level, it is hard for employees to say no and thus participation rates should be high. This also gets younger workers saving early. Try and provide some level of employee education both on the advantages of saving early for retirement and investment choices.
   
   
8. Offer your employees voluntary benefits. The list of such benefits should not be so large as to discourage the average employee, from just not considering all the options, as there are too many choices to pick from. Consider a focus group to determine what type of benefits would make sense with your employees.
   
   
9. Make sure your employees both have enough paid-time off work and are encouraged to take that time off. This will limit more costly absenteeism and presenteeism costs as well reenergizing your staff.
   
   
10. Communicate, communicate, communicate using various medium.