Running your own business is not easy and more often than not you’ll feel like you’re being pulled in all kinds of directions and asked to wear more hats than you ever dreamed of.
There is a solution – outsourcing employee benefit management services to a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) that can help with the less glamorous side of business ownership by assisting with all human resource tasks, which frees up your time to cultivate relationships, serve customers and expand your business.
As you consider working with a PEO, there are some key ways the human resources professionals at an off-site HR company can help you provide better benefits to your number one resource—your employees.
Build Your Benefits
Probably the benefit that we extol the most frequently about is the access you gain to a more comprehensive array of benefits – more likely at a price that you could never garner on your own in the open market. You see, a PEO works as an umbrella company of sorts, pooling all of its available customers to negotiate with benefits providers. With these increased numbers comes increased clout – we can secure a lower rate with more perks so you can offer a package that will truly wow your employees and helps them secure their financial future while protecting the bottom line.
A well-rounded benefits package that includes offerings such as medical, dental and wellness—or even student loan assistance, can also help you grow the company by retaining the talented people you already have and attracting prospective employees.
Get Your Employees Up to Speed
Finding the right employees for your company is a cumbersome task. Depending on your field, you may struggle to get three resumes for a job posting, or alternatively, find yourself buried under a mountain of applicants.
Once you’ve found the right person for the job, you have to begin the onboarding process. This means fill out page after page of new employee paperwork, going over their responsibilities and getting them trained up for the job at hand. It’s a process that can take weeks if you’re super speedy, but for many folks, can take months to complete correctly.
Luckily, PEOs are designed for just this task. Whether its crafting job descriptions to post on the most high-profile sites, conducting screening interviews, helping your new hires to complete their paperwork and even teaching them the skills they need for their new job, outsourced human resources professionals are there every step of the way.
We can also help you upskill your current employees and set up development programs so they can grow their career at your company and not look elsewhere for new opportunities.
Reduce Your Liability
In order to run your business effectively, you must be compliant with literally thousands of regulations – and they update virtually non-stop and with little warning! Don’t think you could mess this up? A whopping one-third of small businesses are fined each year for making mistakes running their payroll – and that’s just one small corner of the compliance market, according to a 2015 survey. Rather than waste your days learning all the regulations in your industry, let a PEO do the heavy lifting. These pros are experts on employment-related compliance – they know what to file, where to file it, and who to file it with.
Make sure you choose a PEO that is a Certified Professional Employer Organization, so if there is ever a slip-up, they’ll be the ones to make it right.
Keep Everyone Safe
Think an accident won’t happen at your business? Approximately 2.8 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses were reported by private industry employers in 2017. This amounts to about 2.8 cases per 100 full-time employees and a total of 5,147 workers died from a work-related injury, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We can all agree that going to work is a risky business and therefore deserving of some attention.
Enter the PEO, which can provide a comprehensive workers compensation program to protect your assets, as well as handle everything that a worker’s comp claim entails (we’re talking on-site inspections, interviews, audits and, you guessed it, a whole ton of paperwork!) It pays to take safety a step further and perform an assessment to help identify areas of your business where safety might be compromised and give you simple fixes to get you up to snuff. A PEO should have a safety officer on staff to help with these measures and ensure compliance with safety regulations.
Interested in learning more about what a PEO can do for your business? Contact us now or download Savvy Small Business Owner’s Guide to HR Outsourcing learn more.
