10 Employee Benefit Plan Tips

Usually, there is a disconnect between employers and employees as it relates to employee benefit plans.  Employees want a comprehensive plan and employers need to be watchful of the bottom line.  Pleasing both parties is not always easy to achieve.

Here are 10 Employee Benefit Plan Tips that if incorporated into your plan, will satisfy almost everyone:

Choosing The Right Funding Model:

Although this decision falls on the part of the employer, choosing the right funding model can leave more money on the table for employee benefits and less in the pocket of the insurance companies and benefits broker.

Getting Value-Added Services Without Paying For Them:

By dealing with a larger Third Party Administrator, leveraging the sum of its clients, small and mid-size companies are usually able to get some benefits or enhanced benefits for nothing or a greatly reduced cost.  An enhanced Accidental Death & Dismemberment benefit, WorkPerks, Disability Management, amongst other benefits that give employees an enhanced plan and doesn’t cost the employer anymore.

Using a Central Dispensing Pharmacy:

By using a CDP, not only can save significantly on drug costs, but employees love the convenience of the service.

Using A Tiered Drug Formulary:

By incentivizing employees to understand the difference between brand and generic or therapeutic alternatives, employees can walk away with additional money in their pocket without compromising the drugs that they’re receiving.

Having a Disability Management Service:

By incorporating a disability management service with your LTD premiums, costs of LTD typically will become lower, and employees get better support while dealing with a potential disability and employers benefit because the objective is to get the employee back to work as quickly as possible.

Total Compensation Statements:

Many benefit providers can provide total compensation statements to employees on behalf of the employer.  By financially quantifying compensation costs like benefit plans, RRSP contributions, pension plans, plus the contributions towards government programs like CPP, EI and EHC costs, it helps the employee see the true cost to their employer.

Online access, automatic payment services:

In this technology-based society we live in, this seems like a no-brainer; however, some benefits consultants suggest to employers to take this right away from employees.  The reason is predicated on fear and mistrust created by the benefits consultant.  This allows employees to get reimbursed quickly and easily.  The cost of slow adjudication and manual processing and reimbursement will cost you much more than time and money.

Introducing Corporate Wellness Programs:

By introducing smoking cessation, weight-loss and exercise programs to employees, the long term savings to your plan will greatly outweigh the initial cost output. The fact that it has such an immeasurable positive effect on employee morale and productivity is another huge benefit.

Benchmarking:

By providing benchmarking information so employers can compare themselves to companies within similar industries or on employers of a similar size, the employee knows that they are on an equivalency compensation scale to their competitors.

Employee Education:

Employees don’t know what they don’t know.  Explaining how and why you should time your time in the dentist’s chair, scrutinize your dental invoice or the differences between generic versus brand drugs can prove to be of great value to employees and employers.  Not only are employees typically responsible for co-pays on their plan, but the savings to an employer over time creates long term sustainability for the plan.

All of these elements can significantly affect how pleased employees and employers are with a company benefit plan.  These should be actively promoted, encouraged and communicated as early and often as possible.