I’m not a benefits expert. I know just enough to be dangerous, but it’s not something I spend a lot of time on each year. I partner with a great broker firm out of Michigan, Grace & Porta, who I trust probably more than any other single HR vendor I’ve ever worked with.
But my broker is the exception, not the rule. That’s why I love Paycor’s Center of Excellence (COE) website and their benefits benchmark quiz! I took it and thankfully I’m currently ‘excelling’ with our benefits. Go take it yourself and find out what level your organization is currently at!
There are a number of things you need to do if you want to excel with your benefits, and here are some ideas to help you optimize what you already have:
1. If you don’t have benefits expertise in-house, find a great broker.
How do you know if you have a great broker? A great broker works to set you up for success. They do this by working with you to understand your pain points and constraints, but also what you need from your benefits to retain and attract great talent. They don’t just give you a renewal contract each year and act like you barely exist!
2. Understand what benefits measures are important to your business.
Again, a great broker should help you with this, but you need to know all the ins and outs of how your employees are using your benefits. Which benefits are doing what they should and which benefits need to be re-designed? Also, you need robust measures around cost—by benefit, by employee, etc.
3. Make it easy for your employees to find and understand what benefits they have.
The easiest way to do this is through technology, as manual processes are difficult for both you and your employees. Do you have online open enrollment? Can your employees find details of their benefits online and can they get educated on these benefits? A great technology solution will do all of this and more for you and your employees.
My goal as a leader is to be an HR Center of Excellence in every part of the HR function. If we are great in one area but suck in another, our employees and our executives will only see what we suck at. The ability to benchmark yourself is a critical first step in putting you and your HR team on the path to excelling!
Hit me in the notes below and let me know what you scored on the quiz. I really liked the stuff around benefits and total compensation, something so many of us forget to market back to our own employees on an annual basis!
Paycor is out to help SMB HR and Talent pros get better. We love that at FOT and we are proud to have them as a sponsor because they think like we think! You can go subscribe to Paycor’s HR Center of Excellence newsletter and download a blueprint for the HR Center of Excellence by clicking this link. As with every FOT sponsor, Paycor has agreed to allow us to write without limits, which is pretty cool as well! If you haven’t checked out Paycor lately, you should—this isn’t your mom’s payroll company!
If you Google “Tim Sackett” you’ll find our Tim, and a truck driver chaplain. Our Tim is NOT the truck driver chaplain, although how awesome would that be if he was!? He is a prolific writer in the HR and TA space who just happens to also run an Engineering and IT contract staffing agency (HRU Technical Resources) out of Michigan. He also writes every day at his own blog, the Tim Sackett Project. Weirdly, he’s known as an expert in workplace hugging, which was kind of cool years ago, but now seems painfully creepy, but we still love him and he’s fairly harmless. Tim is also on the board of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), lifetime Michigan State Spartan fan, husband to a Hall of Fame wife, 3 sons, and his best friend Scout. He also wrote a book with SHRM called The Talent Fix, you can find it on Amazon.