When businesses truly embrace diversity and inclusion, they create a powerful, complementary team that’s unbeatable together . Unfortunately, though, there’s no magic wand you can wave to get there.
To leverage the incredible team-building and innovative
potential of diversity and inclusion, businesses need to articulate strong
values, make them a real part of daily work culture, and create policies and
procedures that hold themselves and their employees accountable. It takes
honest commitment, thoughtful planning, strong follow-through, and built-in
checks and balances along the way.
With that said, no business should be dissuaded from working
towards building diverse and inclusive HR policies just because the work is
complex. In fact, organizations who don’t tackle the challenge and opportunity
of diversity head-on only set themselves up to stagnate.
In this post we’ll explore:
What strong workplace diversity and inclusion
“look like” as we near 2020
How truly valuing diversity and inclusion builds
success for businesses
The many costs associated with undervaluing and not
practicing workplace diversity and inclusion
How HR professionals trying to increase their
knowledge of current best practices for diversity and inclusion can connect
with the best resources
The State of Workplace Diversity & Inclusion
The world of workplace diversity has transformed immensely
over the past decade. A diverse, progressive, and inclusive workplace culture
can no longer be treated like an optional, industry-specific perk. Instead, a
commitment to diversity and inclusion has become a necessity for businesses at
any size. In fact, diversity and inclusion policies are increasingly
requirements when it comes to disclosures for business partnerships, grant
applications, and proposals.
In today’s modern work climate, organizations that don’t understand and leverage the value of workplace diversity will fail to outperform their competitors.
Let’s take a minute to break down both the words “diversity”
and “inclusion” and think about what they really mean in today’s marketplace.
Workplace diversity
means hiring, promoting, and valuing professionals from a variety of different
backgrounds, experiences, and approaches. It means employing people who think
differently, look differently, and experience the world differently from each
other. It means thinking beyond age, race, religion, disability, or sexual
identity. It means trying to build a team that is truly complementary and
reflects the world and marketplace as a whole.
Diversity, however, is nothing without inclusion. In fact, it is inclusion that has become the hot-button
issue and the trendier topic over the last two years. Inclusion is the
company’s devotion to and strategies for ensuring their diverse workforce
functions as a true team, and all people’s skills, values, and perspectives are
valued in a fair way.
As we approach 2020, diversity is firmly cemented as one of
the most important values for all corporations and businesses, while inclusion
is continuing to emerge and take its rightful place as a key focus of HR. Let’s
take a minute to think about what benefits forward-thinking HR departments can
create for their organizations when they get both diversity and inclusion
right.
How Diversity & Inclusion Help Businesses Win
As an HR professional, it’s your job to build a team that
sets your business up for success. From that perspective, diversity and
inclusion aren’t even really values or ideals anymore – they’re simply matters
of best practice.
When your organization embraces a variety of professionals,
perspectives, and people, you create a team that can accomplish more than any
homogeneous group. With that said, maximizing their impact means pairing that
diversity with inclusion – that is to say, diverse staffing practices must be
supported by policies, leadership, and day-to-day workflows that keep everybody
feeling empowered and engaged.
Businesses that call pull those two components off can reap significant
business results that less diverse or inclusive workplaces simply can’t access.
Talent Attraction and Retention
One of the most seismic shifts of the twenty-first century
has been the deemphasis on base salary, especially in the face of a thriving
workplace culture. Simply put, great talent wants to work in a great
environment – one that feels warm but professional, welcoming and collegial.
People also want to work in a place where their perspective
is appreciated and valued. That’s where the organization that values diversity
can connect with outstanding talent. If you can establish an identity and a
reputation as a business that truly creates opportunity for people based on the
strengths of their talents and thinks beyond twentieth-century concepts of what
corporate leadership and a productive office look like, you’ll be operating a
workplace where the very best talent of every background will want to work.
Increased Authentic Engagement
When your boss is the person who signs your check, you’ll
work to meet their expectations. When your boss is a person who shares your
values, applies fairness in every possible situation, and builds a team of
diverse voices that makes you (and everybody) feel heard, you’ll work to exceed
everybody’s expectations.
By fostering a diverse team, promoting diverse leadership,
and creating a workplace where everybody has the level of comfort, support, and
safety they need to get their work done, you can build something truly special:
an environment without glass ceilings or toxic secret inner circles. You will
have a workplace where all employees feel like they’re working positively
toward shared goals. This sets talent up to be their best selves and function
as a whole that’s much greater and more powerful than the sum of its parts.
Building a Variety of Perspectives
Too often, organizations lock themselves into a vision, a
culture, and a way of thinking early on in their lifecycle and craft hiring and
promotion programs in a way that reinforces that orthodoxy. This can be a
recipe for business stagnation.
Forward-thinking businesses aren’t afraid of a diversity of
perspectives or approaches destabilizing what they’ve previously built. On the
contrary, these businesses realize that a team with a wide variety of
backgrounds creates a much greater pool of ideas for innovation,
problem-solving, messaging, and more.
When each department, committee, and project team is diverse
and everybody knows their perspective and work is valued, businesses create the
strongest possible framework for innovative thinking, innovative work, and
innovative approaches to quality assurance.
Fostering a Reputation as a True Modern Business
If you can establish a great, diverse, inclusive workplace
culture where everybody feels supported and bought-in, you can turn your
organization into a destination landing spot for great talent and great buzz
alike. Your HR and marketing departments can leverage your thriving, positive
culture as an anchor point for campaigns that help your business grow and
spread the word about the great work you’re doing.
How Businesses Lose When They Don’t Prioritize Diversity
& Inclusion
Organizations that lack a strong commitment to diversity
don’t just miss out on all the benefits discussed previously, they also create
several very real and very dangerous business problems for themselves. Whether
it’s through explicit exclusion or simply a lack of care at the leadership and
HR levels, businesses that disregard building a thoughtful approach to
diversity put themselves in a tenuous business and legal position.
Businesses that preach diversity on paper but do little to
make inclusion a daily workplace value at every level leave themselves
vulnerable to many of the same problems. In fact, in some ways, a half-hearted
approach to diversity and inclusion can set you up to lose bigger, as the
organization comes away looking either disconnected from its values or like a
fraud.
Increased Turnover
When employees don’t feel fully safe, valued, appreciated,
plugged-in, or supported, they head for the door. Of all the changes to the
workplace over the last twenty years, this is the one that’s caught senior
leaders and HR professionals off-guard the most.
Turnover due to gaps in diversity and inclusion isn’t just
the result of stereotypical harassment or bullying, though. Today’s top talent
is sensitive to their environment and can generally gauge whether or not they
are a fit for a job and its culture within six months. If talent feels there is
a glass ceiling or lack of potential for success and personal happiness due to
your organization’s lack of devotion to diversity and inclusion, they’ll just
hand in their notice and move on.
No HR professional needs to be told how damaging the spend
associated with turnover is. Gaps in productivity, hiring expenses, and
training time all hurt the bottom line and significantly impact the team’s
ability to fire on all cylinders. Even if you’re great at identifying and
hiring diverse talent, you’re just setting your organization up for a brain
drain if there isn’t a framework in place to ensure those professionals are valued
and supported.
Lower Employee Morale & Reduced Engagement
Discrimination and exclusion are ugly things, and when
people see them in the workplace – even devoted professionals – they simply
can’t work like their best selves. To put it simply, toxic cultures bum people
out, and nobody is motivated to do their best work when their workplace feels
toxic.
With that said, the way gaps in inclusion affect morale can
be subtler but no less devastating. When employees are physically present but
feel like they aren’t valued, heard, and included in the same ways as their
peers, their engagement level, buy-in, and quality of work begin to drop at a
steady pace.
One of the biggest mistakes HR leaders make is
underestimating how many people are sensitive to issues of diversity and
inclusion. When discrimination occurs or inclusion is clearly not a priority,
the blow to morale and buy-in extends far beyond the direct victim of the
situation. That means that organizations that do wrong by their minority or
LGBTQ+ employees are actually damaging the productivity, motivation, and
engagement of a much higher percentage of the workforce, who stand as allies to
those groups.
Groupthink
Diversity is a synonym of “variety,” and the less diversity
an organization has, the less variety there will be in terms of innovative
thinking and profit-driving work. If you get a room full of 10 people from
similar backgrounds and ask them to solve a problem, they’ll probably come up
with one or two well-defined ideas. In a room of 10 people from diverse
backgrounds, however, you can have a much richer discussion about possible
solutions because there are more ways of looking at the problem and a wider
range of past experiences and familiar approaches available.
Organizations that don’t prioritize diversity and inclusion
at every level within the organization set up themselves up to fall victim to
groupthink. This can be especially limiting at the executive or leadership
level, where a true team of complementary minds is necessary to steer the work.
Reputation & Perception as an Innovator
In this day and age, reputation is everything, for
individuals and businesses alike. Tone-deaf marketing campaigns sink brands
overnight, and reports of regressive, toxic, or non-inclusive culture on sites
like Glassdoor can quickly limit an organization’s potential to land great
talent.
When people encounter a discriminatory or non-inclusive
environment in today’s culture, they’re not going to suffer in silence or keep
it to themselves. They will use the tools available to make sure that the world
knows exactly what gaps exist in their current or former employee’s commitment
to inclusion.
Legal Issues
Of course, litigation is always the elephant in the room,
especially when HR issues are concerned. When it comes to inclusion and
diversity, a lack of HR commitment can quickly spiral into a costly legal
situation.
On one hand, all organizations in the U.S. with at least 15
employees are beholden to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC).
EEOC investigations and adjudications can last for months, or even years,
creating a long, damaging process that can devastate an organization’s ability
to turn a profit in both the short- and long-term. Depending on the state in
which your business is located, there may be additional anti-discrimination and
inclusion laws you need to consider.
On the other, there’s the specter of civil litigation. Civil
cases can be resolved much more quickly than EEOC investigations, but they can
be just as damaging in terms of finance, reputation, and ongoing employee
morale. No matter where your organization is located, there are several
attorneys in your area who make their bread and butter on discrimination
claims, and they know how to use your own policies (or lack thereof) against
you to win the biggest possible award for their clients.
Key Takeaways
As an HR professional, it’s your job to build the best
possible team and create an environment in which that team can thrive and
succeed. Part of building that great team is truly understanding the importance
of diversity to high-quality work; another part is commitment to supporting the
team you’ve built with policies, procedures, and structure that help them feel
plugged-in and valued.
Some key takeaways from this post include:
Diversity and inclusion are no longer optional workplace values
Businesses that create a welcoming, diverse, inclusive environment provide themselves with the best opportunities for innovation and the widest array of skills and perspectives
Organizations that don’t embrace diversity and inclusion stand to lose the war for talent and set themselves up for legal and financial trouble
How to Learn More
Whether you’re an emerging HR leader trying to build a better understanding of diversity and inclusion or an experienced veteran looking to bring yourself up to speed on how D&I best practices are evolving, be sure to reserve a seat at Launchways’ upcoming Diversity & Inclusion Summit for HR and Finance Leaders.
The free education session will take place after hours on Wednesday, October 16th at TechNexus in Chicago and will feature an expert panel with the Midwest’s leading HR professionals and diversity and inclusion experts, including…
· Rebekah Wolford of Paylocity, a culture- and success-oriented HR leader with experience leading data-driven D&I initiatives
· Alex Koglin of Launchways, a leading Chicago-area employee benefits consultant with a passion for LGBTQ+ rights
· Chanté Thurmond of The Darkest Horse, an executive talent consultant who specializes in radical inclusion and expert team building
· Manny Flores of SomerCor, a small business lender with a track record of empowering diverse entrepreneurs
Panel discussions will be packed with takeaways related to diversity and inclusion, including…
· How to foster a diverse and inclusive company culture
· How to build diverse and inclusive HR policies and practices
· How to ensure compliance with federal and state diversity and inclusion regulations
· How to create diverse and inclusive benefits packages.
In addition to these key insights, open Q&A and networking time will allow attendees to guide and personalize the summit experience to maximize their takeaways. If you’re a finance or HR leader in the Chicago area, be sure to save your seat at the Diversity & Inclusion Summit for HR and Finance Leaders!
This post is brought to you by our valued partner Paylocity.
At Launchways, we believe in doing something radical in the
business world: telling the truth. We have seen clients succeed and fail based
on their ability to foster a vibrant company culture and engage their people
power. And we have found that honesty, transparency, and respect are the keys
to positive business outcomes.
We have taken this experience and ingrained it into every
part of our business. Our people-powered approach to HR and benefits requires
deep honesty and respect between our team members, with our clients, and
between our advisors and our clients’ employees.
So, one of our fundamental core values is being thoughtfully
candid. We think we’ve hit upon something special with this value and the way
we live it in our day-to-day work. Here’s what we have to say about being
thoughtfully candid:
What it means to be thoughtfully candid
Why we value thoughtful candidness
How being thoughtfully candid helps us be better
What Does it Mean
to Be Thoughtfully Candid?
What does it mean to be thoughtfully candid? Well, you can
break it down into its two parts: candidness and thoughtfulness. Being candid
boils down to honesty and transparency while being thoughtful encompasses
empathy and respect. Let’s take a look at each part:
Being Candid:
The principle of candidness is simple enough: just be
honest. But putting it into practice is a lot more complicated because it goes
against what many of us may have been taught.
That’s because we tend to think that honesty is, in some
way, bad. The truth hurts.If you don’t have anything nice to say,
don’t say anything at all. Ignorance is bliss.
But what we’re really saying is that we don’t trust the
other person to handle our honest opinions. The misconception is that it’s
better to pretend that we agree with them or that they are doing a better job
than they really are just to spare their feelings or avoid conflict. But at the
end of the day, this simply isn’t a good way of doing business.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should be outright
rude or mean. And by being thoughtful, we can make sure that the truth doesn’t
hurt. But, even without being thoughtful, being candid is still the best
approach.
Take this example: imagine you get called into your
manager’s office tomorrow. You walk in expecting praise for your work. After
all, they told you how well you were doing when you asked them only last week.
But instead, they tell you that you are being fired because of your poor
performance. Were they doing you a favor by sparing your feelings until your performance
became a serious issue? Or would it have been better for them to come to you as
soon as there was an issue so that you could improve or address underlying
issues?
What does candidness look like at work? The key to
candidness is giving and receiving truly honest feedback and opinions without
taking them personally or trying to spare (or hurt) coworkers’ feelings. It
means giving your honest opinion in all cases, knowing that people will respect
it as such and will respond with equal honesty.
With absolute candidness, there’s no room for
passive-aggressive behavior, backstabbing, and office ‘drama’. In their place
are open communication, mutual respect, and radical problem-solving. But candor
is most effective when it is paired with an equal emphasis on thoughtfulness.
Thoughtfulness:
When you are being candid at work, it’s important to
remember the humanity and intentions of the people you are working with. And to
bring your humanity to bear when forming and sharing your opinions. For your
candid input to be accepted and to foster a productive, energetic workplace, it
has to come from a place of respect and empathy for your coworkers. If you want
them to succeed and be happy, and they know that to be true, then they will
welcome your honesty rather than seeing it as a threat.
So that’s the first aspect of thoughtfulness: empathy.
Knowing where coworkers are coming from when they share their opinions and
feedback, and thinking about their challenges and best interests when forming
your own. Empathy is the basis of mutual respect, and it is also the key to
developing strong, productive relationships with your coworkers.
But there’s more to being thoughtful than being empathetic.
Thoughtfulness also requires that you act intentionally and with an open mind.
We don’t just give our honest opinions: we give our considered opinions. We
think before we speak and try to make sure that our positions are both correct
and truly the honest reflection of what we believe in. This stops haste from
causing miscommunications and gives us even greater trust in what our coworkers
say to us.
We also try to keep as open a mind as possible. Because
everyone is being honest and operating with good intentions, there’s room for
real compromise, consensus, and understanding. There’s even room for people to
change their minds!
Why We Value
Thoughtful Candidness
At Launchways, we know that sustainable business success is
built on the success of each employee. Helping our employees become the best,
most productive versions of themselves is just good business.
In our experience, people want to be challenged. They want
to grow and add to their value as an individual and as an employee. Which
sometimes means pushing them to improve and equipping them with the skills and
knowledge to become better employees.
When we come up with a business strategy or initiative, our
first step is to identify the challenges and issues that we are trying to
address. Without an honest evaluation of the status quo, we cannot develop an
effective strategy. And without honest review of the initiative’s progress,
success or failure are impossible to measure and progress is significantly
stifled.
We believe that employee careers and personal growth should
be approached in the same way. An honest appraisal is also necessary for our
employees’ professional growth. It’s the only way that they can discover what
they need to work on and get the advice they need to effectively address any
issues or skill gaps.
Being candid allows our executives, managers, and team
members to talk to each other honestly, enabling valuable feedback on all
levels (we want our new hires to be just as candid with our CEO as our managers
are with their team members) and empowering our employees to encourage each
other to succeed. We believe that it is not just the morally correct way to
conduct our business but that it is also one of the main factors behind our
rapid success.
And we believe that thoughtfulness is just as important as
candidness. Being thoughtful in our interactions fosters deeper connections
between the people who make Launchways special. It allows us to trust that the
candid feedback and opinions coming from our coworkers come from the best of
intentions and are meant to help us grow as professionals and do our jobs as
effectively as possible. Mutual respect isn’t just an ideal: it is a reality of
life at Launchways.
How Being
Thoughtfully Candid Helps Us Be Better
As one of our core values, thoughtful candidness shapes just
about everything we do at Launchways. It makes us a stronger team and helps us
develop innovative solutions for our clients.
Being thoughtfully candid begins with our weekly roundups
every Monday morning. We start the meeting by giving genuine shout outs to
coworkers we think did an exceptional job the previous week. We then go around
and have each team member share their goals and projects for the week as well
as their roadblocks that they need help on.
These meetings allow us to celebrate each other and share
our projects and challenges. They set the tone of thoughtful candidness and set
up spin-off conversations throughout the week in which we share ideas to help
solve roadblocks and accomplish projects collaboratively.
Of course, being thoughtfully candid is also especially
important to our review and feedback process. Our culture of openness and
respectful honesty allows consistent feedback. That means that everyone knows
where they stand, reducing stress, increasing engagement, and creating consistent
opportunities for improvement.
There’s no simmering resentment or fear of secretly falling
down on the job. If there’s an issue with our performance, we find out right
away. But we’re just as quick to share strengths and successes, so we’ll also
know if we’re doing a good job and feel genuinely appreciated for it. And being
thoughtfully candid allows us to give more than qualitative feedback: it lets
us genuinely help each other succeed rather than focus on raw performance.
Honesty lets us get to the root causes of our challenges and successes.
Best of all, being thoughtfully candid lets us collaborate
more meaningfully. We can work together to solve not only our own challenges,
and those of our coworkers, but also develop better solutions for our clients.
We make realistic plans, execute them more effectively, and track our progress
to create the best possible outcomes. And our clients respect us for our honest
approach and open communication with their internal teams. These collaborations
make our work more meaningful and more successful.
Key Takeaways
Being thoughtfully candid is integral to how we do business
at Launchways. It is one of our five core values that guide our decisions and
culture. As we’ve laid out in this article, being thoughtfully candid means:
Being honest at all times, but also having respect for coworkers and coming from a place of empathy and considered positions
Open communications between coworkers, managers and team members, and leadership with employees
Consistent feedback, personal and professional growth, deeper relationships, and productive collaboration
We think that our way of doing things makes our work more
enjoyable, meaningful, and productive. If joining a team based on thoughtfully
candid communication sounds interesting, check out our career page for current
openings!
CHICAGO, Oct. 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Launchways, a leading provider of human resources, employee benefits, and business insurance solutions, today announced that it is partnering with Rippling to provide its clients with an integrated HR, payroll, and benefits platform.
Founded by Zenefits veteran Parker Conrad, Rippling offers a better alternative for growing businesses as one of the first all-in-one, modernized system for handling the entire employee experience from hiring to offboarding. Rippling’s competitive edge lies in a modern and streamlined interface, its relative affordability, and its scalability. The platform is as easy to use as it is comprehensive and serves a business of ten people just as well as after they grow into a team of a thousand. This unique approach has helped Rippling secure $60M in funding and resulted in widespread acclaim from experts and customers alike, including ranking first among Payroll Software and HR Software on Capterra.
Launchways believes that people fuel business success and help entrepreneurs achieve sustainable growth by empowering their people through intentional benefits and HR strategy. After implementing Rippling for a client, Launchways was impressed both by the support from the Rippling team and the business results for the client. Moving forward, Launchways has decided to create a formal partnership with Rippling to bring Rippling’s technology as a strategic solution to future clients.
The partnership will give Launchways’ clients significant discounts on the software as well as a dedicated service and support team. As James Taylor, Launchways CEO, says: “Rippling is doing something unique in the software industry. We look forward to implementing their solution to streamline our clients’ HR, benefits, and payroll operations. Having a scalable solution helps our clients take a more intentional approach to their benefits and HR.”
About Launchways
Launchways provides business leaders with the resources and guidance they need to build scalable people processes to support long-term growth. Founded in 2009, Launchways has helped thousands of businesses better approach the people side of their business through strategic solutions for human resources, employee benefits, and business insurance. For more information, please visit www.launchways.com.
About Rippling
Rippling is the first way for businesses to manage their HR & IT — from payroll and benefits, to employee computers and apps — all in one, modern system. It’s the only platform that truly unifies every employee system, and automates all of the administrative work. For more information, please visit https://www.rippling.com.
Health benefits are important to
everyone. Your employees need them for their well-being and you need healthy
employees who want to stay and work for you. The benefits you offer show how
important your employees are to you. Unfortunately, most employees don’t fully
understand their benefits or what they cover. With open enrollment coming up,
this is the perfect time to educate employees and make sure everyone in your
organization is getting what they want out of their benefits plan.
In this post we’ll present:
Where knowledge about employee benefits breaks
down
How employees get their information about their
benefits
How you can make your open enrollment more
effective
Where knowledge
about benefits breaks down
Having good health benefits is crucial
for being a working adult in the United States. And yet, most adults who have
health coverage don’t fully understand it. A poll from Maestro Health showed that 35% – over one third! – of employees
don’t fully understand their healthcare coverage, with some saying they know
nothing about it. For something that is so expensive and that shapes so many
Americans’ employment decisions, this is a concerning blind spot. That ignorance
is not surprising given how complicated the medical coverage process can be.
Where open enrollment could be the
perfect opportunity for educating employees so they can make good benefit
decisions for a lifetime, it often ends up being a time for more confusion and
quick, impulsive decisions to avoid digging deeper for information. If your
employees have made plan choices that don’t benefit them or don’t do so
efficiently, they are in for a whole year of struggling with insurance
companies and providers. That can result in employees needing to spend more
time away from work and possibly getting into debt from poorly managed healthcare
costs. It’s also a miserable process for your employees to experience.
A survey from Aflac shows that 80% of employees say that their benefits package
influences their engagement with their job. It also stated that 57% of
employees would accept lower compensation in a job if it had better benefits.
Clearly the confidence an employee has in their coverage is a very important
part of their employment decisions, so anything you can do to make them more
confident in the decisions they’re making will make you a more attractive
employer.
How employees get
their information
If employees don’t fully understand their
benefits, where are they getting their information? The most trusted source for
benefit information for most employees is another person. A recent survey from Colonial Life showed that, no matter what generation they are
from, employees prefer to talk to a trusted person for their benefits
information rather than going to a website. More often than not, that trusted
person is an HR or Benefits professional, but it can also be family members,
friends, or colleagues. The point is, when it comes to something as personal as
discussing employee benefits, people prefer a human touch.
Make your open
enrollment work better
How can your company make open enrollment
the most helpful, educational, and productive time possible for you and your
employees? There are a few things you can do to help make that experience work
better for everyone.
Ask what
employees want
Ahead of enrollment, ask your employees
what they want from their benefits. This can be a general question posed to all
employees, or a survey with specific questions on each benefits offering. You
may find that your benefits program is either missing out on a needed area or
is offering plans that aren’t relevant to your workforce. If you find a need
for significant changes to your plans, you’ll want to start this process well
before you kick-off the enrollment period.
Limit the
bombardment of information
One possibly counterintuitive answer to
solving the open enrollment puzzle is to limit the amount of information you’re
giving your employees ahead of enrollment. This doesn’t mean keeping them
deliberately in the dark about their options.
Instead, this means not bombarding employees
with everything remotely related to their health benefits and all possible plan
options. Without any guidance to prioritize that information, your employees
will have no idea what’s relevant to them. This can be overwhelming for
employees that are already stressed about picking the right plan options.
Instead, start with general information that should apply to all employees.
Explain confusing benefits terminology. Walk people through the process step-by-step.
Remember that you’ll be educating your employees over time.
Make sure they
have the basics
While having information from printed
material and online is crucial, most employees don’t find this information
useful when they have a question specific to their personal healthcare needs.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make this content available, just that it should
be supplemented with other channels for benefits information. Make sure to
provide all employees with:
A schedule for open enrollment, including all key
dates and deadlines.
A statement of their current coverage.
Summaries, changes, and rates that are specific
for each individual plan.
An open enrollment guide and forms.
Contact information for knowledgeable sources in
HR/Benefits for specific questions or
additional help
Communicate all
year long
You don’t want open enrollment to be the only time your employees think
about their benefits and health coverage. Set a communications plan for letting
employees know about changes, deadlines, and general information throughout the
year. This can be tailored around changing seasons, birthdays, employee
anniversaries, or any other signpost that’s a good time to examine and learn
about their benefits. If learning about tackling advantage of their benefits is
on your employee’s radar all year long, they’re going to be in a better
position to retain what they learn and use that knowledge effectively during
open enrollment season.
Let them know
about non-traditional benefits
If your company offers non-traditional (more than standard medical)
benefits, communicate that to your employees. Many companies are attracting top
talent with benefits like tuition assistance or telehealth programs. If
benefits like these are options during open enrollment, make sure your
employees know about these offerings and help them sign up for what makes sense
for them and their families.
Voluntary insurance is becoming more important to employees. These are
policies that cover periods of disability, critical illness, or accidents where
major medical insurance may not cover costs like deductibles or copays. Again,
if this is something you offer your employees, this should be advertised to
them along with guidance on how to sign up.
Use alternative
modes of distributing information
Employees learn in a variety of ways, and sometimes benefit from
multiple sources of information. Some companies use online articles forwarded
via email; quizzes and contests on benefits information; brown-bag lunches with
speakers; or town-hall meetings to field individual questions. You can schedule
these throughout the year, increasing the amount of time people are actively
thinking and learning about their benefit options.
Analyze what
worked when you’re done
Once your open enrollment is over, take a hard look at what worked well
for you and what didn’t. This is the perfect time to solicit feedback on how easy
(or difficult) the process was, how accessible needed information was, and what
people would like to see in the future. Similarly, check with your management
and HR staff to see what could be done to make things easier for them for the
next enrollment. Look at that feedback and figure out if the issues are with
the processes for getting people informed and enrolled, or if there are bigger
issues with the policies your company has available. Also look at your initial
survey information to see if there are gaps or surpluses in what you offer
currently. The best time to make changes in your plans is well before the next
open enrollment.
Get a hands-on
employee benefits broker
This entire process can be made much
easier through partnering with a proactive, hands-on employee benefits broker. A
great broker is knowledgeable about all the different employee benefit options available
so they can build plans tailored to your workforce’s unique needs and
effectively educate your teams to take advantage of those plans. This process
is done through in-person education sessions (usually on-site), interactive webinars,
and one-on-one phone calls with employees who may have specific questions.
Your next steps
There’s a lot your company can do to make
open enrollment the most successful it can be:
Ask what employees want
Limit the bombardment of information
Make sure employees have the basics
Communicate all year long
Let employees know about non-traditional benefits
Use alternative modes of distributing information
Analyze what worked when you’re done
Work with a great employee benefits broker
Your employees will be happier knowing they have the right coverage. The sense that their employer is concerned about their health and well-being goes a long way as well. And employees with a well-fitting health insurance plan will also cost your business less in the long-run. Your employees are the most important asset your company has. More than that, they’re the people who want to make your company thrive, so help them engage with a benefits plan that allows them to thrive too.
At Launchways we take a drastically different approach to
benefits and human resources. We believe that we do best for ourselves by doing
best for our clients and that our clients thrive when they do right by their
employees. We know that benefits and effective HR are some of the best tools
that growing businesses can use to attract, engage, and retain the talent they
need to not only survive but thrive and grow.
By taking a personalized approach, we can find unique
solutions that reduce costs while actually improving the value that our clients
provide for their employees. Our team is deeply involved in our clients’
business and that’s why we act as partners and problem solvers instead of
salespeople. Which has not only helped us rapidly grow our business but also
makes it genuinely rewarding to come into work each day.
Here’s how we do things differently at Launchways to ensure
we’re always doing what’s best for our clients:
A consultative sales process means we find the solutions that work best for our clients
We help people first to empower business results
Our team becomes an extension of our clients’ teams so we act as experts not only in benefits and HR but also in our clients’ industries
Constant innovation helps Launchways and its clients thrive
Scalable solutions mean that we build long-term client relationships
Consultative Sales: Finding the Solutions that Work for
Clients
One of the best things about what we do at Launchways is
that we get to be problem solvers instead of salesmen. Our business thrives by
always providing our clients with the solutions that best meet their specific
needs and budgets. That means that we take a consultative
sales approach with our clients.
What does a consultative sales process entail? Essentially,
it means that we are selling solutions instead of products. Our sales team
members serve as consultants for our clients, guiding them towards the
insurance plans, benefits, and technology partners that will work the best for
them and their businesses.
We use our industry experience to advise our clients about
which options we think are right for them and build connections with premier vendors
to provide our clients with the best possible options. This unique approach
means that we don’t bring our clients “out-of-the-box” packages and ask them to
pick one. Instead, we craft custom, strategic solutions that are tailored to
each client’s unique needs. While we have formed numerous strategic
partnerships with insurers, benefits providers, and technology companies, we
don’t pitch our clients on their solutions. Instead, we leverage our
partnerships to deliver unique savings, greater support, and customized
solutions to fuel our clients’ businesses.
Helping People First to Deliver Business Results
Our business model is based on the essential truth that a
company is only as strong as its people and that businesses perform best when
they do best by their employees. Growing businesses might come to Launchways to
control costs, increase employee productivity and retention, and achieve other
business results, but our solutions are ultimately grounded in helping our
clients build and maintain a team that fuels business success.
What does that mean for Launchways? For one thing, it means we
are extremely strategic in the way we help our clients control costs at their
businesses. Reducing costs is important for most of our clients. But we understand
how to balance cost cutting with maintaining employee happiness and building an
attractive employer brand.
Growing businesses can often achieve the cost-savings they
need by reducing bureaucracy, rather than reducing the quality of employee
healthcare. We streamline processes, generate savings through strategic plan
design, and identify real employee healthcare needs to increase the benefits
that matter most to employees while eliminating waste.
A Business of Partnership: Consultants and Advisors not
Brokers
Launchways is a growing business that understands the pain
points that our fellow scaling businesses face. We understand that benefits and
HR are very personal topics and should be addressed with personalized
solutions. Launchways takes a uniquely boutique approach to benefits and human
resources. Our team serves an extension of our clients’ human resources and leadership
teams, helping steer their companies towards sustainable growth and scalable
solutions.
Under this approach, our advisors serve as partners and
problem solvers. Our team embeds itself in our clients’ businesses to create custom
solutions for unique challenges. We get the opportunity to work not just for
Launchways but for each of Launchways’ clients.
Constant Innovation
Because of our dedication to doing everything possible to
help our clients and their employees succeed, Launchways is always searching
for new ways to empower our clients’ benefits and human resources. Whether it’s
a new benefits management software platform, unique wellness benefit,
telehealth program or innovative approach to prescription savings, our job is
to find out what the cutting-edge solutions are and determine how we can
leverage them to help our clients.
At Launchways, we always have our eyes on the horizon so we
never get stuck in a rut. We are constantly pushing forward, never content to
rest still and implement the same solutions over and over again until they
become outdated.
The focus on innovation to fuel client results fundamentally
changes the nature of our organization and how we operate. From our trendy office
space at the heart of Chicago’s startup district, our work-life balance, and
even the way we handle our internal communications, Launchways lives-and-breathes
like a tech startup rather than a traditional benefits broker.
Human resources and benefits should be exciting and
rewarding. The Launchways approach cuts through the usual bureaucracy to bring
the focus back on people and innovative problem-solving.
Scalable Solutions Mean Long Term Relationships
Businesses’ needs change as they grow, their employee
demographics and priorities change, and the market shifts. And the solutions
available to address business challenges are changing just as quickly.
So while Launchways is dedicated to implementing solutions
and strategies that can scale with our clients’ growth, we know that truly
scalable solutions require continuous feedback and revision. We know that we
won’t do right by our clients if we just sell them a new benefits package and
then move onto the next account. Instead, we forge long term relationships in
which we make our expertise, resources, and strategic partners available to
meet any issues that our clients might face. Ongoing service and consultation are
an integral part of our business at its core.
Key Takeaways
Launchways was founded to provide a better model to tackle
the benefits and human resources challenges that growing businesses face. Our
mission has led us to take an unconventional stance for a successful benefits
broker: we always do what’s best for our clients and their employees. This has
a ripple effect that changes just about everything about how we do business,
including:
Our sales team takes a fully consultative sales approach that focuses on building solutions, not selling products
We get to help people because we know that businesses succeed when they help their employees succeed
Launchways’ benefits advisors become an extension of our clients’ teams, getting to know their businesses and working for them as much as for Launchways
Technological advancements and changes in the healthcare market mean that Launchways is constantly innovating to deliver the best results possible
There is no one-off solution for benefits and human resources challenges, so we take a long-term approach to our client relationships that makes our work more productive and rewarding
Do you like the sound of doing what’s best for your clients,
forming deeper relationships with clients’ teams, and developing solutions that
help people? The Launchways model has proved successful and we are expanding
our team to meet the growing demand for our business model. Check out the open
positions on our careers page.
I’ve been building, managing, and supporting strong,
functional teams for two decades, and while I get lots of great questions from
emerging leaders and HR professionals every day, so many of their concerns boil
down to two key questions:
How can I center my team to make sure they’re
doing great work that’s consistently done our way, not just their
way?
How can I show off what my great team’s all
about in a way that builds enthusiasm in the public and aids in recruiting?
Believe it or not, those two questions are actually quite
closely connected. Even though one is an internal/operational concern and the
other is an external/marketing concern, they both have the same answer: an
organization aligned behind clearly articulated organizational values.
Your company’s identity is incredibly powerful. It dictates
the flow of talent, the volume of inbound business, and how your partners,
competitors, and the general public engage with your brand.
In this post I’ll explore:
Why well-articulated values are so useful
How corporate values should be structured and
focused
What a real-life example of strong guiding
values looks like
The Value in Values
Remember when you were in school and that one teacher spent
an entire week doing icebreakers and “getting to know you” games before they
dove into lessons? It might have seemed silly or pointless at the time, but
that educator was actually attempting to do something much bigger than
communicate facts – they were trying to turn a room of individuals with varying
degrees of comfort and familiarity with each other into a thriving, upbeat
community.
That same teacher, even if they were fun and free-spirited,
probably seemed to have a tremendous zest for going over classroom rules and procedures
as well. You might’ve rolled your eyes at the time, but through an adult lens,
what they were doing was very purposeful: they were establishing expectations
and establishing the rigid, non-negotiable elements of the classroom culture.
So why all the education analogies? Well, frankly, teachers
are some of the smartest problem-solvers in the world when it comes to
generating buy-in and engagement, and that’s what your organization’s core values
are all about.
An organization’s values give them two-way benefit just as
those early-year classroom activities do. Both the teacher and the employer
gain a level of clearly articulated authority and identity that set the tone
for the work, while also humanizing the experience in a way that invites the employees,
to get involved and get excited.
Values Set the Tone
Your corporate values set the tone both for how your brand
interacts with the world around it and how individuals within the organization
interact with each other and outsiders. Businesses that get that right set
themselves up to build a great team and get a lot done. Businesses who lack
articulation or don’t meaningfully honor their values can’t maximize their
potential in the same way because they’re not establishing expectations fully
or giving the individual members of the team something to believe in that’s
bigger than themselves.
Great articulation means great engagement, and great
engagement means great work.
Crafting Your Company Values
Every organization, large or small, should have an
established set of values to guide the vision, dictate the tone of business,
and aid in meaningful business- and community-based goal setting. Generating
those values should be the collaborative responsibility of senior leadership.
HR, marketing, and representatives from other key teams or departments should
have a voice in the process, but the values must flow from and reflect
leadership.
That doesn’t mean your values are all about “what the bosses
care about,” though. Those brainstorming sessions must be guided by a clear
understanding of how those values will connect to, motivate, and engage your
current employees, leading talent in your industry, and the community and world
at large.
Sticking to the Core
One of the most common mistakes organizations make when they
set about the work of articulating values is, well, articulating too many
values. A company’s values should represent the most relevant and overarching
aspects of their approach to work and their place in the world, not every
little thing they think is important.
When it comes to corporate values, three to five is the
ideal number, as it ensures you’re building an identity that’s supported by
multiple strong pillars that you can focus on and truly honor without so many
values that the message becomes diluted.
Values are Real, Not Aspirational
The other big mistake organizations make when they create
corporate values is that they try to give “the right answers” rather than
actually focusing on the ideas that are closest to their work and most relevant
to the uniqueness of their own workforce. That often leads to a lot of lofty
goals and minimal follow-through.
To work as part of an employee culture, talent attraction,
or marketing campaign and meaningfully support an organization, corporate
values must be real, must be honored, and must be rooted in the daily
challenges, triumphs, and guiding lights of what makes both day-to-day work and
“the work” on the whole special at that business. A lack of follow-through will
only undermine the potential gains of articulating values and working to
establish a culture in the first place.
Launchways’ Core Values
Now that I’ve laid out all that theory on why core values
are so important and what businesses need to do to get them right, let’s
transition to looking at a real-world example.
At Launchways, we recently established a new set of company
values to help flesh out our core identity and set the tone for our work moving
forward. Each value was carefully discussed and debated by our leadership team,
and the result was a powerful list that made the entire team feel great about
our present and even more excited about our future.
Let’s explore Launchways’ five core values one at a time:
Resourceful
We are a resourceful organization. We take initiative, we
own the challenges that are set before us, and we embrace the work of finding
solutions, no matter what it takes.
Driven
We are a driven enterprise. We’re passionate about what we
do, and we strive to always go above-and-beyond for our clients and for each
other.
Change-Maker
We’re a disruptive business. We’re unafraid to do things
different, especially when we think it can yield better results. We’re
confident in our ability to improve the industry.
Thoughtfully Candid
We’re a reflective and honest brand. We value constructive
conversation and believe that difference of opinion can make conversations and
businesses stronger.
Community-Builder
We’re a community-minded team. We’re always looking for new
ways to support members of our Launchways community while also engaging with
the greater Chicago community.
Key Takeaways
Establishing core values is an extremely important process to
get right. A few key takeaways I’ve learned in the process include:
Articulating and documenting your business’
values make it easier to establish a clear direction for your business
Values should both set the tone for and reflect
your organization’s culture
Values need to be real, not aspirational; values
that aren’t honored will undermine the process
Businesses should stick to five or fewer core
values or principles to avoid diluting the message
As we approach 2020, businesses are more concerned than ever
with being scaled and built for profitability. Teams are leaner than ever,
superstar talent carry greater workloads, and businesses that aren’t built for
sustained growth are disappearing fast.
In that quest to trim the fat, controlling employee benefit
overspend should be a major goal for all growing businesses. Even with
responsibly scaled salaries, employee benefit offerings that aren’t well-selected
can cause an organization’s compensation costs to balloon, significantly eating
into opportunities for profitability.
Moving forward, we’ll explore:
How benefit overspend can happen to any
organization
Why monitoring benefit overspend is especially
relevant for growing organizations
How to understand which benefits are actually
beneficial
How to bring finance, HR, and senior leadership
together to make benefits work for everyone
Why Benefit Overspend is Such a Common Problem
Employee compensation is one an organization’s strongest
tools when it comes to talent acquisition and retention. That means that the
quality and value of your benefits program is indeed crucial to building a
great team that’s fit, happy, and productive.
Unfortunately, however, scaling and aligning those benefit
offerings is a complex task. In fact, compensation plan design is probably one
of the most difficult tasks HR has to manage. That intimidation factor, paired
with the fact that human resources professionals don’t always have the
background in finance they need to correlate the direct connection between
employee benefits compensation and the bottom line, is why benefit overspend
happens in so many organizations.
More is Better, Right?
The biggest mistake businesses (especially new businesses)
make when they design a benefits plan is trying to include every form of
inclusive coverage and access to any valuable program. In the increasingly
competitive war for talent, that kind of an approach can be attractive at face
value, but year-to-year, it can become a burdensome anchor on business
profitability.
Both benefits professionals and individual consumers
frequently make the mistake of assuming benefits are like a stockpile of food
for emergencies: it’s maintained in case you need it and provides peace of
mind, but it’s not a part of your daily, weekly, or monthly life. If that’s
your paradigm, then of course you’re going to assume more is better.
Here’s the truth, though: Impactful benefits programs aren’t
the emergency food in the basement; they’re the dry and canned food in the
pantry – they’re there for use in a pinch day-to-day. True “benefits” are the
offerings that provide value, security, and convenience to employees’ and their
families’ everyday lives.
Once you understand that, it quickly becomes clear that
bigger isn’t better; usefulness and accessibility improve benefits programs.
Over-Emphasis on Industry Competition
One of the most common ways new or growing businesses fall
into benefit over-spend is over-reliance on industry benchmarks to help guide
their benefit plan design. While benchmarking is a great tool to help you
understand and plan relatively fixed expenses like base salary, benefits
packages must be scaled to the individual business and workforce.
Without an incredibly deep and granular understanding of
your competition or goal competition’s complete financial picture, you can’t
reasonably predict that their employee benefit practices will translate to
success in your organization.
Studying the competition’s benefit offerings certainly has
value and can inform your planning, but if it’s the main guiding light for your
benefits program, you’re making the classic mistake of focusing on the
competition rather than yourself. Finance, HR, and overall leadership must work
together to articulate a vision of the business, its blueprint for success, and
how benefits can be scaled to make that happen.
Lack of Understanding Means Lack of Alignment
Another classic mistake businesses of every size and sector
make is that they create their benefits plans for a hypothetical team of
theoretical employees instead of letting the real needs of their actual employees
shape the process. While that can be quite difficult at outset, after a year or
two of benefit program usage, you should have enough data available to create a
rich understanding of what people within your organization need to build that
daily health and security we’ve discussed.
If you’re not working to optimize your offerings to what
people actually use, you’re likely creating or fostering overspend. At the same
time, however, your benefits program must also answer and scale to finance
goals. In just a minute, we’ll explore how you can leverage HR and finance help
create that alignment.
Why Benefit Overspend is a Potential Pitfall for Growing
Businesses
Early-stage businesses are incredibly dynamic, but that also
means there is the potential for vulnerability. A disappointing quarter or
behind-schedule development project can quickly erode a business’
profitability, and without the secure cash holdings of an established company, bloated
employee benefits spend can turn into a big red number for a given financial
term.
In order for an organization to grow continuously, with an
expanding staff and increasingly complex human capital structure, an employee
benefits program must account for not just costs at the program’s launch but of
the way those costs might balloon, expand, or creep as the company grows. That
means benefits plans aren’t just about the design that will land talent right
now, they must be plugged into and built with short- and long-term financial
and organizational plans in mind.
When benefits are well-scaled and well-aligned, they support
an organization’s internal team, maximizing their ability to do great work
while also maximizing the organization’s chances for profit as well as their
ability to make informed financial projections. Finance leaders, HR leaders,
and CEOs must come together to create that robust, clear vision, or they’re not
really thinking about or planning for growth.
Defining “Benefit” in a Way that Makes Sense for Everyone
Increasingly, employers and employees alike are aware of the
fact that employee benefits are actually an opportunity to create mutual
benefit. The old way of thinking was that businesses offered benefits to be
competitive and benevolent. Now, however, the cards are on the table, and
people understand that part of the benefits game is keeping employees present
and productive.
That doesn’t mean the pendulum has swung back and benefit
plan design can be all about making the books look good, however. Medical care,
prescription drugs, and hospital visits are only increasing in cost, and more
people than ever have complex, potentially expensive medical needs.
Creating an approach to benefits that works for everybody
and supports growth truly requires finding a balance between the needs of the
actual people within your organization and the financial needs of the
organization as a business. You can’t serve either purpose exclusively and
expect to solve the problem in a satisfying way; both sets of values must be
accounted for.
Understanding What People Really Need
As we’ve said before, one of the best ways to understand
your actual organizational healthcare/benefit needs is to understand your
employees’ actual healthcare/benefit needs. There are two main ways to do this:
by asking them using surveys or other tools or by reviewing your carrier’s
usage reports. The best approach involves using and weighing both.
Too often, employers are scared to talk to their team
members about benefits because they’re scared all they’ll hear is that the programs
aren’t good enough. While there’s sure to be a certain degree of that feedback,
the discussion can also provide the best-possible understanding of what people
actually want, need, and value. If you can get the buy-in you need to build an
authentic data set, a lot of your most important questions can be answered for
you definitively.
Those usage reports from your carrier will fill in the
quantitative data to help you understand which offerings are most accessible
and well-used (which, remember, means “valuable”). You can also build a very
strong understanding of where the dead weight in your benefits program might be.
Understanding What the Business Can Bear
Once you have a strong grasp on your human needs, the next
step is to determine what kinds of plans and packages your organization can
reasonably offer. Obviously, the goal is to create packages that deliver
consistent, satisfying offerings while still leaving yourself the best chance
to predict and achieve business growth.
If identifying and eliminating overspend is your primary
goal, this is really the most important point in the process. HR needs a clear
picture of the finance goals so that they can create plans accordingly. At the
same time, finance requires HR’s understanding of day-to-day employee needs in
order to do their work in an accurate manner. Bringing those two data sets and
approaches together can seem incredibly challenging at first, but it’s actually
your best chance to get benefits right in a way that works for everyone.
Embracing the Push-Pull
The intersection of HR and finance can be tricky to navigate
because both sets of professionals come from very different backgrounds and
come equipped with what some might say are competing sets of values. With that
said, they share the most important common ground of all: they’re responsible
for setting up operations for success.
Getting your employees the benefits they need while keeping
the business lean and scaled for profit and growth is a tall task, and frankly,
no one person can make it happen. It takes a major commitment from leadership
and a willingness between finance and HR to work together, plan together, and
commit to seeing things through each other’s lenses (at least some of the
time).
When your organization can articulate an approach that makes
HR, finance, and the executive suite or boardroom happy at the same, that’s how
you know you’re onto something really great.
Key Takeaways
Employee benefit overspend is rampant across business, and
part of the problem is that many organizations don’t understanding how or why
their approach to benefits isn’t aligned with their employees’ needs or
business goals. In order to create impactful benefits packages that delight
your team and drive business, it’s important to remember:
More is not better when it comes to benefits because overspend can be devastating to potential profitability
In early-stage or growing businesses, benefit overspend can be especially damaging
Overspend usually happens because organizations either lack a strong understanding of employees’ actual needs or feel the need to offer exhaustive benefits in the name of competition
To truly be “beneficial,” offerings must be impactful and see actual use
When it comes to determining which benefits are actually essential, ground-level employees (and their usage data) are your best resource
Part of getting benefits right is learning to manage the dance between humanistic priorities and business priorities
Illinois is seeing some big changes to anti-harassment training requirements for employers. Governor Pritzker signed Senate Bill 75, the Workplace Transparency Act, on August 9th, 2019. This bill amends the Illinois Human Rights Act to add sexual harassment training requirements, in addition to other changes to discrimination laws in the state.
The law is still being formalized by lawmakers, but this is
a major accomplishment, as Illinois hasn’t seen laws quite like this ever
before. This new bill comes after the Illinois Capitol in Springfield garnered
scrutiny and criticism for sexual harassment and related “pervasive behavior,”
as state senator Sue
Rezin told the Chicago Tribune,
particularly within Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan’s office.
The law is also a response to the entire #MeToo movement
that picked up in 2017. According to a report from the National Women’s Law
Center, 15
states have now passed new protections, including approximately 200 bills,
which are related to protections against workplace harassment.
As these new regulations are going through the approval
process, you’re now tasked as an Illinois employer with following updates and
understanding what it means for the way you run your business. Here’s
everything you need to know about the new requirements, some of which are still
being hashed out.
Annual Training Requirement
The bill outlines that employers must give mandatory annual
trainings on the following topics, beginning January 1st, 2020. The
comprehensive sexual harassment training program has to include the following
information:
Description and clarification of what sexual
harassment is
Examples of sexual harassment conduct
Information about government provisions, such as
what remedies are available to sexual harassment victims
Information about the employer’s responsibility
to prevent, investigate, and correct sexual harassment
Guidelines for the Service
Industry
The bill also outlines requirements for employers in the
bar, restaurant, hotel, and casino sectors. Hotels and casinos must offer
employees a way to alert security or managers with a portable notification
device if they need help, are being harassed, or witness an instance of
assault.
Bars and restaurants now must have a policy around sexual
harassment that gives employees guidelines on how they can report allegations
or file a charge with the state Department of Human Rights. These employers
also must offer annual harassment trainings, specific to the industry, in both
Spanish and English.
Other Provisions
The law also states that employers cannot require their
workers to sign nondisclosure agreements or arbitration agreements that are
related to harassment, discrimination, or retaliation.
In addition to protections for regular company employees,
independent contractors are also protected from harassment and discrimination
under the new law. As the gig economy is picking up, this is important, since
companies are working with contractors and consultants more now than ever
before. An NPR poll last year showed that one
in five jobs in America is held by a contract worker.
The bill also sets out requirements for employers and labor
organizations to disclose administrative or judicial decisions that are adverse
regarding harassment or discrimination in the previous year to the Illinois
Department of Human Rights. July 1st, 2020 is the first date of required
disclosures, and will be required every July 1 thereafter.
What happens if you
fail to comply?
The bill outlines penalties for employers that fail to
comply with the new requirements. These include civil penalties of:
$500 if the company has less than four employees
$1,000 if the company has more than four
employees
Repeat violations could be as much as $5,000 for each
instance.
Key Takeaways
The bottom line is that Illinois may pass legislation that
all employers, regardless of their number of employees, must provide sexual
harassment training to each and every employee.
Key points to remember about the proposed bill are:
If the bill is finalized, training programs must
be implemented beginning January 1st, 2020.
There are specific guidelines you must follow as
an employer when implementing the harassment trainings, such as disclosing information
about what harassment is and steps victims can take to report it.
Employers that are bars, restaurants, hotels,
and casinos have additional guidelines to follow regarding the safety of their
employees.
Employers cannot require workers to sign
nondisclosure agreements related to harassment, discrimination, or retaliation.
Independent contractors are also protected under
this law.
Penalty fees may apply if employers fail to
implement the sexual harassment trainings.
Launchways is your
trusted resource, always keeping you informed of upcoming changes related to
compliance. Once the sexual harassment training requirements are solidified, we
will offer a strategic solution to the training requirement.
Most businesses begin their employee benefit journey fully-insured for good reason. Early in a business’ growth cycle, it’s highly advantageous to keep monthly healthcare expenses predictable and under control, with any variation squarely the carrier’s problem.
However, once a business has grown past that developmental stage and stabilized with a properly scaled workforce and projections of continued success, self-funding becomes increasingly attractive. When businesses self-fund, they gain more granular access to their bottom-line healthcare expenses and can potentially save money in the long term by assuming increased benefit management responsibilities and opening themselves up to a little more risk.
Moving forward, we’ll explore:
• Why growing businesses should transition toward self-funding
• First steps for businesses looking to self-fund
• Important planning considerations for organizations hoping to self-fund
• The advantages and disadvantages of level funding
Why Transition Toward Self-Funding? Shifting toward a self-funded benefits program is a major decision for any organization and not something that can be accomplished without a great deal of planning and follow-through. While the process may sound daunting for HR and finance leaders accustomed to fully-insured processes, there are tangible benefits available for those brave and organized enough to make self-funding a priority.
Leveraging Your Business’ Stability to Reduce Overspend Self-funding uses organizational size and stability to reduce average monthly costs, as the employer significantly lowers overhead by paying a variable monthly fee based directly on employee claims (healthcare usage).
While there are increased internal management responsibilities for benefits professionals on the HR team in self-funded scenarios, there are also significant gains, as organizations reduce administrative fees and take power back from carriers when it comes to dictating monthly costs. That kind of overspend reduction can help tighten up an employee compensation budget for HR departments looking to stay streamlined for company growth, even if headcount begins to rise.
Businesses don’t need to be large to benefit from self-funding, either. In the right scenarios, self-funding is possible at almost any scale, as long as the employer truly understands what their employees need and will use in terms of healthcare.
Why Variable Cost can be Preferable to Fixed Premiums Many risk-averse planners might be tempted to stick with the predictability of fixed-rate, fully-insured plans because the number you know is much less daunting than a worst-case-scenario figure. However, stop-loss and excess-loss coverage are specifically available to limit the financial blow of catastrophic claims scenarios, which means that a month of coverage for a healthy workforce could, in many situations, be significantly cheaper than a month at the fully-insured rate.
Furthermore, if the employer maintains a healthy workforce where daily wellness and preventative medicine are values and priorities, expensive trips to the emergency room and invasive procedures are minimized through plan design and education. That means self-funded companies can exponentially increase their benefit if they establish a (or take advantage of an existing) meaningful culture of wellness.
Leveraging a self-funded plan might seem like a risky and costly expense, but it’s actually a long-term investment in the company’s ability to grow and work better. In the same way, the potentially increased cost of self-funded insurance is mitigated by the opportunity to reduce inefficiencies and overspend in most cases.
Providing Exactly What Your Employees Need Of course, in any conversation about employee benefits, the benefit of the employees needs to be a central focus. Working for a company with self-funded insurance is beneficial to team members throughout the organization, as the savings from reduced administrated costs can be passed down from the employer to individual policy-holders.
Additionally, self-funding means the employer has more specific control over benefit offerings and, with a strong understanding of employee needs, can design plans in a more thoughtful, specific, and employee-focused way than ever before. Of course, businesses can only achieve that if they have a rich, detailed knowledge of their employees’ and their families’ medical needs, claims-related behaviors, and emerging trends and technology that connect employees with medicine and medical professionals in innovative and cost-effective ways.
Maximizing a self-funding transition requires incredible preparation and a robust base of knowledge about both plan design generally and each individual organization’s specific finance picture, needs, and goals.
Preparing to Self-Fund Achieving self-funding is a journey unto itself that forces HR and finance to work together to establish the best-possible understanding of needs, possible solutions, and the impact of each on the bottom line.
The Importance of Preparation In short, if a self-funded employee benefits program is not designed and scaled correctly, it can significantly harm the company’s ability to maximize profitability. On the other hand, though, getting self-funding right opens the door to a variety of gains for both the business and its employees. The difference between those two outcomes is good planning.
Altering a benefit funding model is a paradigm shift that no one professional or department can make happen on their own. Cross-department planning and collaboration must occur in order for all relevant decision-makers to get a full picture of current healthcare costs, the possible impact of transitioning toward self-funding, how benefit offerings will change, etc. That means input from HR, finance, the boardroom, and beyond is necessary to plan for a strong, positive transition.
When HR, finance, and senior leadership have a shared understanding of how self-funding will reduce overspend without tying the company’s hands in a way that impacts profitability, then the real design work starts.
Understanding and Planning for Risks One of the reasons self-funding is such a cost-saver is because, in self-funding, a business assumes a great deal more variable risk. In a fully-funded scenario, a catastrophic accident or life-changing diagnosis to an employee impacts a company’s healthcare fees very minimally – that security is part of what businesses pay for. Once a business is self-funded, however, a major uptick in claims or a string of big-ticket claims can certainly eat into profitability for the month or quarter.
Minimizing those risks requires researching stop-loss and excess-loss coverage and determining how that coverage should be scaled to your workforce and its needs to provide the business with the profitability protection it requires. Reducing the risk of such high-cost events from occurring through employee health and wellness offerings (which are significantly cheaper than the cost of reactive medical care) is another crucial proactive planning measure.
Maximizing the Data Available to You Designing a self-funded plan requires a rich understanding of the benefits and services employees absolutely need. By studying the healthcare utilization data available through their providers, HR leaders and CFOs can get a very clear, specific understanding of what kind of services employees are using regularly and what their actual costs are.
That data is incredibly valuable in planning what a standard “month” of real expenses in a self-funded scenario might look like compared to current fully-funded costs. Again, the transition toward self-funding cannot be made or even attempted until that data story is fully understood, or else the company is simply self-funding for the sake of self-funding, rather than making an educated, profit-minded decision to improve healthcare efficiency.
Scaling Your Benefit Plans to Your Funding Goals Once a commitment to self-funding has been made and HR and finance have worked together to understand how the transition will support company growth and translate to more efficient spending, the next step is to think about how the change in funding model will affect specific benefits offerings.
To be blunt, plan design is more important than ever for HR to ensure self-funding is efficient at scale and supports growth. Armed with utilization data and other measures of employee need such as surveys, internal leadership must work with a benefits broker who understands the transition plan and the importance of plan success in order to create benefits packages that are highly valuable to team members while remaining mindful of the bottom line.
To guarantee success, no HR leader or department should be working on their own during this period. Input from leadership, finance, and your benefits broker can be incredibly useful to ensure proper perspective is maintained and the transition plan is well-aligned with short- and long-term company goals.
Meeting in the Middle: What about Level Funding? Some organizations looking to transition away from a fully-funded approach without completely losing their safety net may be interested in what is known as “level funding.” Level funding provides a middle ground between fully- and self-funded benefits programs, in which the carrier and the employer share responsibility.
What is Level Funding? In a level funding scenario, an organization pays a set monthly fee to an insurance carrier, as in traditional fully-funded plans. However, the carrier tracks actual employee usage and claims throughout the year so that at year’s end, the difference between the actual claims and the monthly fees can be determined.
If the employer organization’s monthly spending equals more than the total of the claims at the end of the year, they are reimbursed the difference. However, if the value of the claims is greater than the amount the employer paid in, they must pay the carrier the difference.
Level funding can be highly beneficial for businesses who understand their utilization picture extremely well and can predict with great certainty that they will be will not stray an acceptable percentage from the projected payments. On the other hand, if an organization goes into a level funding situation without truly understanding their employees’ needs, it can lead to an additional payment at year’s end.
In short, level funding protects businesses from many of the administrative challenges of self-funding but doesn’t carry the same cost-saving benefits as a well-planned, well-executed self-funded approach.
Key Takeaways The transition from fully-funded insurance offerings toward a self-funded program is one of the biggest and most important adjustments an HR department can oversee. Pulled off successfully, a self-funding initiative can streamline healthcare costs while keeping the entire team productive and well-supported. Scaled, planned for, or executed incorrectly, however, self-funding attempts can put a major strain on a business’ month-to-month profitability.
If you’re an HR professional or finance leader starting to consider whether your organization is ready to begin the journey toward self-funding, remember: • Self-funding is a great way to reduce healthcare overspend by embracing variable fees month to month • In a self-funded model, employer healthcare costs are based on actual usage, not projections • Transitioning toward self-funding is a crucial shift that requires organization-wide commitment and extensive planning o Healthcare utilization data can be valuable in this work o Understanding risks and connecting with the coverage needed to mitigate them is crucial • Partnership with finance is necessary to ensure benefits offerings are scaled with company capabilities and objectives • Level funding offers a blend between self- and fully-funded approaches that eliminates both the best- and worst-case scenarios for self-funding failure/success • Working with the right employee benefits broker can help your business smoothly transition to a self-funded strategy
Addressing diversity and inclusion within your workplace is
more than just giving trainings and seminars and sending informational emails. Only
with true action will employees know that you’re addressing their concerns, and
it can take time to show them just how committed your business is to diversity.
Updating your employee benefits package to ensure that your
offerings are designed for the diverse workforce you’re looking to create and
foster is a crucial step in your business’ diversity efforts.
Here’s what you need to know about the different ways your
office can be inclusive, and how to design your benefits package for a truly
diverse company.
Types of Workplace Diversity
to Consider
The term “diversity” doesn’t just refer to one thing, and it
takes many forms in the workplace and elsewhere. Types
of workplace diversity to consider when taking a look at your company data
and updating policies are:
Generational
Gender/gender identity
Sexual orientation
Race and ethnicity
Religious beliefs
Disability
Socioeconomic status
Lifestyle
Political views
And others
As you can see, diversity is more than ensuring half of your
employees are women, or that people of color are represented, though those are of
course important considerations. It’s also about avoiding any form of discrimination
based on age, gender, race, religion, or disability.
There are many factors to think about when creating your
diversity plan and updating business elements like benefits packages and
employee handbook policies.
What to Include in Your
Workplace Policies
First of all, remember that some applicable workplace laws are made on a state-by-state basis, not on a federal level. Some attorneys recommend going with the most comprehensive protection plans out there, even if you’re not required to do so in your state. This means you should update your policies to be in compliance with these regulations.
One example is the protection of discrimination against sexual
orientation, which is not one of the included categories of Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, sex discrimination is protected under the
act, and workers have been known to file lawsuits that argue their sexual
orientation cases under these protections instead.
As such, it’s a good idea to include in your policies that
discriminatory actions such as firing an employee because of his or her
mannerisms, or not treating a female employee fairly because she isn’t
“womanlike,” are prohibited, as they are forms of sex discrimination.
Other ways to update policies accordingly is to develop or
include gender-transitioning resources for employees, or to include the most
current, acceptable, and inclusive terminology in employee materials.
Designing Benefits For
a Diverse Workforce
The most important aspect of updating your benefits package
is making sure that the benefits offered are fair and equitable to all employees.
Let’s take a look at the ways in which you can revamp your benefits
offerings, in addition to your company policies. Think through these areas to
get started with building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.
Financial Benefits
for Different Generations
Analyze the financial benefit offerings your company
currently provides, such as retirement contributions, student loan debt
assistance, and savings accounts. Are they more geared toward a younger
audience, or an older audience?
For example, student loan debt is an affliction that impacts
generations across the board, but research from Experian showed that Generation
X, who are between 39 and 54, has the
most student loan debt, with Baby Boomers in second (ages 55 to 73) and Millennials
third (ages 23 to 38). Although it may seem like the younger generations would
want benefits related to paying off their student loans, this is clearly an
issue that all generation struggle with.
Another financial consideration here is retirement benefits.
Baby Boomers are the closest to retiring, but research from the Insured
Retirement Institute (IRI) shows that 45% of people in this age group don’t
have any retirement savings. As such, retirement savings assistance
shouldn’t just be catered to the long-term. In addition, benefits like phased
retirement plans and medical programs for retirees can help this generation better
prepare for life after work.
Family Benefits
Another way to address diversity within benefits is what you
offer for families. Important considerations in this category are:
Assistance with childcare
Parental leave
Adoption leave
Elder care services
Another benefit that can help support families through these
matters is a dependent
care flexible spending account, which helps employees pay for care services
while they’re at work.
Benefits for Same-Sex
Couples and Domestic Partners
Spousal healthcare coverage and other benefits have long
been offered to heterosexual couples. It’s now important to offer these benefits
for same-sex couples, in addition to couples who are in domestic
partnerships. This also means that parental or family leave benefits should apply
to these couples, even if they’re not legally married.
Flexibility Benefits
Because there are so many different perspectives,
experiences, and abilities that exist within your workforce, a crucial benefit to
provide is flexibility. Whether due to having children, a disability or
illness, or caring for a sick family member, flexible work options allow
employees to adapt their schedules and their location based on their personal needs.
However, this means that the flexibility benefits must apply to all employees
that require a different working arrangement, and cannot be implemented
unfairly. Employees should feel comfortable and never feel guilty about using
these benefits when they need them.
Holidays
A major part of your benefits package is time off for
holidays. This has typically only included the major American holidays, both
religious and political. However, think about the employees within your company
that don’t celebrate the “mainstream” American holidays, who instead celebrate
holidays from their own cultural background.
Implement benefits that allow employees to take off the
holidays that are important to their culture or religion, and make it simple
for them to request these days off. One effective way to implement these
benefits is to offer “floating holidays” that employees can use however they
wish.
Ask Your Employees
Even with the best intentions, you won’t completely satisfy
your diverse workforce unless you allow them to speak up. An easy way for your
company to gain invaluable information about what workers care about and what
they want in their benefits packages is simply to ask them.
Send out surveys and ask for feedback. Ask them if they feel
like their needs are being recognized and respected, whatever they may be. Companies
often make a mistake when they assume that employees have certain wants, needs,
and beliefs, so it’s important to avoid those dangerous assumptions when
updating your benefits package. Instead, let employees tell you what’s most
important to them.
Key Takeaways
As you’re strategizing to create a more diverse and
inclusive workplace, making tangible within your benefits package is one
important way to keep your company on track. Remember:
There are many “types” of diversity within any
workplace.
Create policies that offer the most protections
possible against discrimination, regardless of whether your local laws require
all of them.
Different generations have different financial
priorities.
Offer family benefits like paid family leave and
dependent care assistance.
Make sure health insurance and other applicable benefits
are also offered for same-sex couples and domestic partners.
A range of flexibility options, like remote
working or flexible schedules, can help employees with family, disability, or
other concerns.
Not all employees celebrate the same holidays,
religious or not. Floating holidays can ensure that they take time off when
it’s applicable to their beliefs or culture.
Ask your employees directly what they want or
what they feel they are missing from their current benefits package.
Remember that your employee benefits package will only be designed for a diverse workplace if the offerings are applicable to everyone on your team. Avoid making assumptions about what’s important to your employees, and you’ll quickly be on your way to an inclusive, satisfying benefits package.
