How To Provide Employee Benefits On A Budget

With the lack of talented and motivated employees’ attraction and retention is a struggle, there are various jobs available today to top talent with incredible capabilities and experience. To garner their attention or encourage them to stay with you, it’s vital to create a positive work environment, offer decent pay, and generous employee benefits. While it is often dismissed, providing benefits is a great recruitment and retention strategy. It even promotes the health and well-being of your employees and their family, which is good for business.

Unfortunately, employee benefits can be a hefty expense for most small businesses, and this may lead you to choose poor options or none at all. But, if you do a little bit of research and planning, finding suitably priced employee or group benefits should be easier. To help you scope out affordable benefits, Arrival Benefit Solutions has listed a few tips on how to provide employee benefits on a budget.

Understand your options and costs
Avoid choosing on the spot when acquiring benefits for your employees. Understand all of the options available to you and how they will impact your expenses, only then make a decision. Be careful with the cheapest plan, as it may not provide attractive benefits options or enough spending room to make it feasible for the employee. 

Choose a plan that preserves health
Every dollar spent on health care has a more significant financial benefit to your employee than a dollar raise. If you contribute to the health and welfare of your staff, they are more likely to enjoy working for you. A dollar raise is taxable and hit with CPP and EI deductions. A dollar towards health and Dental benefits goes straight into your employees’ pocket as their healthcare costs are covered. The average Canadian family with no coverage can spend $ 3500 and year on health and dental out of pocket.

See how far your budget will go
Another strategy you can follow is to put your budget up against the basic benefit options and see how far your dollar will go. By this, we mean, identify the essential benefits you can afford for your staff, and if you can handle more, try to see how much coverage is possible. You can always start small and increase next year if business is going well. 

Understand the other cost mitigation strategies
By getting to know the other cost mitigating strategies like deductibles, co-insurance, and co-pays, you will learn more about what you are contributing towards. It will help you decide what to keep and what to remove from your benefits.

Build a cost-effective plan
Once you understand all the essentials involved in acquiring the ideal benefits for your employees, the next step is to put together everything you learned and build a cost-effective plan. This plan must meet your budget needs as well as the needs of your employees.

Know where you can get affordable solutions
There are always great strategies found in understanding how to make dental and paramedical options cheaper. If you pay attention to your options in the finer details, you can often tweak a benefit to be more cost-effective yet not have a great impact or sacrifice on the employee.

Know where you need to spend more
Drug plans are the most critical benefit you can offer your staff. They also have a very significant impact on employees and their families when a health crisis occurs. If budgets are tight, caps can be added to mitigate costs, but be mindful, there is a huge impact on a capped Drug plan versus unlimited if someone gets really sick. Only cap if it is the difference between providing something rather than nothing.

Seek professional advice
There are professionals willing to guide you when it comes to choosing benefits for your employees. With their assistance, you can reduce the time spent on researching options. Based on your needs and budget, they will appropriately help you strategize your employee benefits. That way, your time is better spent focusing on your business. They will understand that the price of employee benefits varies based on the demographics, and the dozen or so options that can be tweaked to match value with budget.

For a reliable group benefits expert, reach out to Ken Bechard, the owner of Arrival Benefit Solutions! I serve clients across Chatham-Kent, London, Sarnia, Leamington, Windsor, and the surrounding areas. My approach to helping others is to build trust among my clients and gather all the facts and details to provide tailored insurance solutions that fit my clients’ needs. For over twenty years, I have worked with business owners, controllers, and CEOs with a focus on transforming productivity in leading Canadian companies. During my interactions with them, I have provided great solutions to attract employees and motivate them to stay. By working with you, I can undoubtedly help you do the same.

To learn all about my group benefits products and services, please click here or get in touch with me by clicking here.