Employer Strategies

Benefits & Compensation

Benefits & Compensation

Beyond wages, there is so much more an employer can offer an employee that improve their overall financial wellness. By covering some or all the cost of an employer-sponsored health plan, employers can help employees maintain their health. Prioritizing benefits including paid time off, consistent scheduling, and more robust, equitable 401k plans help employees plan for family expenses and future needs. Explore the case studies below to see how area companies are tackling these issues to address the needs of their workforce.

Strategy: Examine health care coverage and costs
How employers can help:
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We’ve been able to improve the health benefits that we offer and been creative in ways of doing that. So we changed to a high deductible HSA but in doing that we were able to contribute $1500 annually to each employee’s HSA.
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One item to consider is a tiered approach for contributions based on the take-home pay of the employees, so the lower-paid employees can actually pay a lower contribution to the plan vs those who are higher paid. That has been a huge success that has helps to drive commitment from our employees.
Strategy: Compensate with equity
How employers can help:
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[It's not heroic—] I’m looking to grow my business. If I want my employees to surprise and delight my clients—in that we would be missed if we weren’t there—then my job is to do the same for my employees. It’s hard to find good people, and I’m grateful when I have them.
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If you have employees who are that low-paid they are going to be very quick to jump to another job somewhere else for just a little bit more money so we have to be very conscious about all that. There's no one size fits all.
Strategy: Invest in the future of your workforce
How employers can help:
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Our employee retirement account balances are higher, on average, than that of employees in the same size small business market in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, meaning that our employees are better positioned for retirement.
I work in Human Resources, and we’re constantly soliciting our employees to enroll in our 401k plan. It’s a wise investment decision, yet we only have a 70% participation rate. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why 30% of our workers wouldn’t want free money. When they’ve said to me, “You really don’t understand; I’m trying to make ends meet,” the little voice inside me said, “Yeah, get rid of the Starbucks.” But now it’s all coming together. They’re dealing with something bigger.
– Human Resources Professional, Engineering
And it drives me bananas how low we pay in certain positions, because you get what you pay for, as they say, and we have a lot of turnover in certain positions. But the question I ask myself is, ‘What is the incentive to work in today’s world—the long-term thinking of professional advancement?’ And how does that play into the bigger picture of solving the problem?
– Human Resources Professional
We have different salary tiers in HR for benefits. Those who make less pay less. And interestingly, we have people who teeter on the pay scale, where if we give them a raise, they say, ‘I don’t want that, because now I'm going to have to pay more for my healthcare, which will end up costing more than my raise.’ You can’t blame them, and It tends to happen to our lowest-wage employees.
– Human Resources Professional
Benefits & Compensation
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