This site explains three secrets successful business owners know that helps them hire and keep the best employees.
The first secret successful business owners know that helps them hire and keep the best employees is using employee benefits to support and reinforce their corporate culture.
Benefit plans that employees are proud of improves employee retention and reduces employee turnover. Employees feel valued when there are heard, they feel respected when they have choice, and they feel special when you provide exactly what they believe they need. Designing your benefits plan to reflect these values will differentiate you from your peer employers.
Corporate culture is the identity of your organization, how you see yourself, what you believe, what inspires you, where you are going and what the ideal future looks like. A positive, healthy corporate culture increases productivity and boosts morale. Mixed messages can confuse employees, undermine your efforts to build a healthy working environment and led to mistrust, cynicism, dishonesty, a demotivated workforce and low staff retention.
For example, if you say you care about and support employees yet don't provide disability insurance you are making it clear that during difficult times, when an employee is most vulnerable that they stand alone. The mixed message can be subtle until a co-worker becomes ill, depletes savings and loses their home.
To ensure that your employee benefit program supports and reinforces your corporate culture simply map the values of your corporate culture to the values and strategies of your employee benefit program.
For example, if empowerment and individual choice is part of you corporate culture then it could be mapped to the degree of flexibility and employee choice that is available in your employee benefit program.
The second secret successful business owners know that helps them hire and keep the best employees is using employee benefits to create a workforce advantage.
Most organizations have a few key employees that set the pace, determine direction and achieve results. The loss of one of these leaders to your competitor could set you back years. Creating flexible benefit coverage that meet the unique needs of these key people can give you a competitive advantage at very low cost.
This principle can be applied more broadly and give you a workforce advantage by differentiating yourself from the competition through your employees. It could be that you have the most creative, competent, helpful or reliable staff. Intentionally selecting for and nurturing the employee qualities that sustain the momentum of your organization is critical to your success.
Providing the type of benefits that your ideal employees desire helps draw them to you and keep them with you. For example, if your business requires a steady stream of young, creative workers then an innovative flexible benefit plan would be more appreciated than the rigid plan design that their grandparents appreciated for its security.
The third secret successful business owners know that helps them hire and keep the best employees is using employee benefits to create a cost advantage.
Your company benefit plan does not need to be more expensive than the employers that you compete with; it just needs to be different. Once you understand the needs of your organization, as well as the various segments of your workforce, you can design a benefit plan that differentiates you from your competitors. Let’s face it, most employees are covered a benefit plan that was design more than half a century ago. Sure the method of claims changed to electronic adjudication thirty years ago but that’s it. Coverage is typically ideal for a single income family with children. Your benefit plan can reflect the diversity of your workforce and give employees the choice that they have come to expect.
A cost advantage is achieved by differentiating yourself from the competition through your expense structure. Customizing benefits for key segments of your workforce can reduce your overall benefit expense as well reduce staff turnover and the associated costs.
Employee benefit plans are part of total compensation and need to be managed to maximize impact and minimize waste. Providing more benefits than are necessary creates a needless expense. Providing the wrong type of benefit can contribute to staff turnover and related costs.
For example, if the most critical segment of the workforce is those with many years of experience then a plan that increased coverage based on seniority would be more effective and less expensive than one that provided all employees with the same level of benefit.
