Archive for the ‘Total Compensation’ Category
by Joe Blattner | October 1, 2019
Today, the ideal total compensation package is as diverse as the current workforce itself. In fact, it has to be in order for companies to attract and retain the absolute best employees.
Your employees may vary greatly in age, location (urban, suburban, rural), gender, and marital status. They also most likely vary in how they work – from home or at the office? From a computer or by phone or some other type of a machine? By travelling on sales calls or going into the office every day? These are all things to take into consideration. Not to mention, employees working for the same companies have very different job descriptions and skill sets. Why give all employees the same exact benefit package, when employees are all so different?
If you are trying to provide a one-for-all solution, you are more than likely leaving some of your employees behind. By taking the demographics of your workforce into consideration, you can remove the guesswork of a one-handed solution and offer employees a worthwhile benefits package with options.
Regardless of whether or not your company is small or large or somewhere in between, tailoring benefits to the specific needs of your employees does wonders for morale. It’s also a smart move if you aren’t able to compensate monetarily as much as your competition. To bridge the salary gap, the savviest of employers know they must make up the difference by offering an attractive total compensation package and one that make sense for the employees in question.
Think about it. Would you offer an on-site daycare facility as a part of your benefits package if a large portion of your workforce is under the age of 25? If most of your employees commute by bus, would including a parking spot be relevant or even necessary? If you have telecommuters working for you maybe they don’t get to enjoy the “complimentary” coffee you keep in steady stream in the office – why not offer your virtual assistant a monthly $10 gift card to a local cafe?
Another example would be if employees are expected to use their own vehicles for company business, a prepaid gas card would help to defray fuel expenses. Do employees work from home using their own equipment and Internet service? If so, you might want to consider providing laptops with Internet access.
The cost of providing employees with potentially expensive perks such as insurance, holiday bonuses, company cars, laptops, cell phone service, tuition reimbursement, or stock options may naturally be a great concern, but it may not be as high as factoring in the cost of recruiting and retraining new hires. Offsetting salaries with a diverse selection of fringe benefits is one of the simplest ways of compensating employees smartly.
In essence, offering a diversified benefits package gives you the luxury of not only attracting talent, but also keeping the top talent in your field happy to be on board. Providing options and showing individualized attention can be priceless. And with the right software, it doesn’t have to be difficult, either. COMPackage offers customers a comprehensive list of over 60 benefit ideas as a natural part of their total compensation software subscription.
Getting the Word Out
After revamping benefits packages to meet the unique and changing needs of your employees, it is imperative to then ensure they are fully aware of their total compensation. It is often astounding for employees to find out how much their employer pays for their total compensation, but sometimes it’s also a shock to the employer, when they start adding it all up.
Many employees are completely unaware of the extent or contents of their work benefits. Are key employees being lured away and accepting other positions offering a higher base salary? They may not be so quick to make a move if they had all the facts about their benefits package.
Employees and potential recruits need to know the full costs associated with having them on staff. Knowing this gives them a better idea of their true compensation and it also allows for essential employee feedback. Encouraging employees to provide feedback regarding which types of compensation are most important to them gives you a definitive edge when it comes to yet another important aspect of any successful business – employee retention.
But how can you give them all of this information without spending a ridiculous amount of time compiling data or an exorbitant amount of money outsourcing the task to a third party?
The answer is using total compensation statement software for creating employee compensation reports and detailed benefits statements. Benefits statements will give your employees a clear and concise picture conveying exactly how much they are really being compensated for their services.
What interesting ways does your company provide benefits? We would love to hear your ideas for diversifying benefits in the comments below.
by Joe Blattner | August 21, 2019
If you’re like most business owners or HR Managers, you know that communicating with employees about their salary and benefits is always a touchy subject. It’s best to plan accordingly and ensure that the timing is appropriate. But when is a good time to tell employees what their salary, health benefits, sick time, vacation time, and countless other perks are worth? Well, the answer is…it depends.
There are several different occasions and times of the year when your organization may be best suited for giving employees their . Given that a detailed summary of employee benefits is a boost to morale, the Holiday Season or New Year can be a great time to give employees the gift of a complete rewards statement. Although an annual benefits report is sometimes adequate, there are many other times throughout the year when a total compensation statement can help attract, retain, and positively impact your employees.
Hiring
First impressions are always important, and the way you welcome a new employee to your company is no exception. That’s why hiring can be an excellent time to present a total compensation statement. Letting a new or potential employee know just what you’re prepared to provide, even beyond their regular salary, is a great way to get that new relationship off to a solid start. In addition, employees who are comparing other offers can fully see what your company is offering them, and if the competition doesn’t provide a total compensation statement, your company is going to be viewed as the better choice.
Promotions or Raises
Another good time to discuss benefits is during a promotion or request for a promotion. Oftentimes in such discussions, the focus is solely on the actual wages offered or sought. However, it is wise to also emphasize the other benefits an employee is receiving outside their paycheck, such as paid sick time, free parking, a laptop, cell phone, or several other perks. Even intangibles like flexible scheduling can and should be part of the discussion, since they contribute to the overall employee welfare, contentment, and productivity.
Reviews
Annual or semi-annual performance reviews are also an excellent time to bring up total compensation. While discussing what the employee has done for the company, you can also showcase the full dimensions of what your company is providing. A comprehensive total compensation statement can boost morale and employee loyalty, and makes an excellent accompaniment to any words of encouragement that you may offer during a review.
Significant Life Events
There are some events in life that have a direct correlation to employee benefits. Occasions such as marriage or divorce, starting a family, illness or approaching retirement can be opportune times to present a total compensation statement. Since an employee may become eligible for additional benefits at these times, taking the initiative to let them know what they qualify for and what they receive is a great way to show that you’re truly looking out for your team.
Remember, the full measure of benefits your employees receive far exceeds their actual wages. This is good news, so share it freely!
by Joe Blattner | January 2, 2019
Employers are often perplexed by how much they should spend on employee benefits. How much is too much for things like vacation time or bonuses?
A recent report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that benefits make up about 30% of the average worker’s total compensation. According to this September 2018 report, employer paid benefits represent 46% of an employee’s wage. So, if I pay you one dollar in base pay, I would on average pay you $0.46 in benefits!
That’s a number most employers and employees do not know. And if you are a gracious employer, like most of COMPackage’s customers, it’s even more!
The report provides separate numbers for civilian, private, and government workers, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll just look at the private business numbers. The highest percentage of benefit costs for private employers was insurance at 7.9%, followed by required benefits, at 7.7%, and paid leave, at 7.0%
According to the report, an employee with an annual salary of $50,000 would have a total compensation of $70,721. That employee’s package on average would include:
- $5,667 for insurance
- $5,524 for legally required benefits
- $5022 for paid leave
- $2,798 for retirement and savings
- $2,726 for supplemental pay
And if you never tell your employees, or their managers, they will never know!
by Joe Blattner | November 19, 2018
Ask most employees if they’d rather have cash or non-cash incentives, and they’ll choose the cash incentives almost every time. However, as an employer, you have many other factors to consider when choosing an incentive other than whether or not employees say they want it. Carefully consider the benefits and drawbacks of cash bonuses before creating your incentive program.
Benefits of Cash Incentives
- Nothing talks louder than cash – Many employers find that as soon as they offer cash incentives for a task, their employees start working harder. For fast, effective gratification, few incentives work better than cash.
- Easy to distribute – Cash incentives require little extra effort on the part of an employer to distribute. Money can either be added to a paycheck or distributed as cash.
- Practical – Many non-cash incentives appeal more to some people than others. While some employees may not need a new iPod or tickets to a sporting event, everyone can benefit from a little extra cash.
Drawbacks of Cash Incentives
- Can become viewed as base pay – When employees receive cash bonuses on a regular basis, they can come to expect them as part of their base pay. For example, many people rely on their annual Christmas bonuses or quarterly commission checks to pay their bills. If these benefits ever have to be taken away, things could get ugly fast.
- Disappears quickly – Cash incentives are often quickly forgotten because they are spent on necessities – things like bills, debt or Christmas presents. On the other hand, even small non-cash incentives like movie tickets, electronics or gift cards are remembered long after they’ve been received.
- Takes the joy out of incentives – Non-cash incentives often make a more positive impact because they are viewed as “treats,” while cash incentives are often seen as more practical.
The best incentive programs often involve a mix of cash and non-cash incentives. To show your employees how much their non-cash incentives are worth, consider total compensation statements through COMPackage.
by Joe Blattner | October 28, 2016
For many people, employment is not just about the money. Though salary plays a big role on whether or not someone is happy with their job, the whole compensation package is what matters more – especially when the financial sum of all the benefits being provided is significant.
Thus, it’s important for your company to be able to communicate the full value of your benefits plan to all your employees, especially if there’s a change they should know about. But even without changes, employees may not be aware of exactly how much they’re getting, causing them not to take advantage of everything they’re entitled to, and diminished appreciation of their total employment compensation.
A sure way to inform your employees about their benefits is by issuing them a personalized benefit statement, but this is not an easy thing to do manually, even if you have a relatively small workforce. In this case, you’ll need employee statement benefit software like COMPackage to streamline and automate the process for you. But aside from this added convenience, here are other compelling reasons to invest in such a solution:
- Cost effectiveness — Manual creation of benefit statements (even with the help of Excel) takes time, especially for companies with more than 40-50 employees. Also, this is more prone to error. It’s best to use a specialized tool, like low-cost total compensation statement software, to minimize mistakes and speed up the creation process. When less effort and time are spent, your company can allocate a smaller budget for creating benefit statements without having to sacrifice quality.
- Customized statements — Different kinds of employees have different kinds of benefits, so it’s not advisable to use one form for everyone in the workforce. You run the risk of having some employees feel discouraged if they see benefits others are receiving at a higher pay grade. Using COMPackage employee statement benefit software addresses this by allowing users to define benefits according to only what they receive.
- Accurate computations — Some companies attempt to provide total compensation reports using spreadsheets. However, these are difficult to maintain. Moreover, they don’t help you identify many types of benefits that could be reported, such as non-monetary perks which can still have a quantifiable dollar value.
- Employee satisfaction — With employee statement benefit software, you can clearly lay out each aspect of an employee’s compensation package to help them grasp the total value of what your company is giving them. Once they do understand, they’ll be able to appreciate how better-compensated they are, leading to higher employee satisfaction, which can result in improved productivity and stronger loyalty.
- Recruitment advantage — A lot of employers and employees focus on the salary when recruiting and searching, respectively. But wouldn’t it be great if you could attract ideal candidates with the whole compensation package – which, on average, represents over 43% more than base pay – that your company can offer? And wouldn’t it be greater if you can present them with an easy-to-understand statement that lists all the benefits they’ll be getting and the total value of their compensation? When you use employee benefit statement software, you can create detailed customized reports on professional-looking templates fit to be given to top talent. It’s an effective way to attract them to your company.
People will always be the top resource of your company, so make sure you invest in them. It’s not enough to grant them a good compensation package — you also have to encourage them to make the most of it. With the help of COMPackage, you can give them the push they need.
by Joe Blattner | September 28, 2016
Competitive employee benefit packages are the cornerstone of employee retention. While employers can often offer smaller perks and incentives to increase overall employee morale, without a comprehensive benefits package, new qualified applicants won’t walk through the door – and seasoned experienced employees will look for better opportunities elsewhere.
The Cost of Losing Talent
Employees leave jobs for a host of reasons. Yet each time your company loses an employee, there are qualitative and quantitative costs incurred. This comes in the form of lost productivity, advertising for a new position, hiring and training a replacement, and customer service issues with a reduced staff. A study by the Society for Human Resource Management indicates that, on average, it costs 6-9 months of an employee’s salary to replace that employee. For example, to replace an employee making about $60,000 per year would cost a company about $30,000 to $45,000.
Happy Employees Are Retained Employees
Maintaining a positive relationship with your employees is not a matter of guesswork. Employees want to know that they are respected and appreciated. They also want a balance between their professional and personal lives. Don’t be afraid to actively engage with your employees to determine what aspects matter most to them. This will help you narrow the focus of your employee benefit packages.
Building a Comprehensive Package
When thinking about employee benefits, it’s important to consider all aspects of an employee’s well-being. Far too often, small business owners focus solely on health insurance options. That’s a vital aspect of the benefits plan certainly, but it is not the only aspect worth considering.
401(k)
Besides health insurance, the 401(k) is the second most important aspect of comprehensive employee benefit packages. Employees want to know they will one day be able to enjoy a comfortable retirement. It’s so important, in fact, recent studies have shown that a well managed 401(k) program can add approximately 8% to the overall profitability to the company.
Paid Time Off
All employees need the chance to recharge their batteries. It increases overall productivity and helps elevate employee morale. It’s also an important component of a comprehensive benefits package. Traditionally, companies offered different types of time off including sick leave, vacation, and holidays. Today, more companies are incorporating a more consolidated approach toward paid leave and allowing employees to decide when and how to utilize their personal days.
Short and Long Term Disability
Accidents and illnesses happen. Although we all hope to avoid them, many of us will at one point or another need disability insurance for ourselves or our loved ones. If your employee is suddenly out of work for a serious medical condition, they will need to replace their lost income to continue to provide for their family. Short and long term disability packages allow employees to have the peace of mind that their family’s needs will continue to be met even during a medical hardship. Additionally, many of these types of plans are completely employee funded so employers incur no additional cost for the program.
Dental and Vision
Standard health insurance rarely offers any type of coverage for dental or vision. For your employees with families and small children, these types of policies can help offer a tangible savings in overall health expenses. While the costs of many of these programs are often shared between the employee and the employer, the expense is more than paid back in employee satisfaction.
Flexible Spending Accounts
Flexible spending accounts allow employees to pay for medical expenses such as deductibles and co-pays with pre-tax dollars.
Communicating Value
Providing excellent benefits without regularly communicating the value of these benefits to your employees is a missed opportunity. People are prone to take things for granted; and, those who don’t still often miss the big picture. The solution is to communicate the value of the total package you are providing each employee, using online solutions such as COMPackage. Such a solution is easy-to-use, inexpensive, and powerful in how it clearly and simply communicates the value of each employee’s overall package.
by Joe Blattner | October 20, 2015
Total Compensation Statements are increasingly popular among employers as a way to boost company morale and retain top performers. Providing the total value of their employment will help you quiet the noise that comes with employees that look too closely at the paycheck, and only the net portion, at that!
Benefit Range
Few people are aware of the true power and value of giving your employees compensation statements. They create a useful log of the investments a company makes in its employees. This allows workers to see what they receive above and beyond the salary that they see. Employees are, most typically, happier and work harder if they understand all that their company invests in them.
Having an understanding of the value of the benefits employees receive is equally important to employee retention. A worker who can see all of his or her benefits in one place is less likely to feel unsatisfied with his or her salary. This leads to fewer requests for large salary increases and fewer employees looking outside the company for a bigger salary separate from their total compensation.
Deliver the Report by Manager to Employee
As useful as a compensation statement may be, not all of them are intuitive to read. Benefits will be better understood, and appreciated, if they are presented clearly, and with good graphics. If reader find absorbing the details difficult, they may forego reading the total compensation statements altogether, wasting your efforts to communicate the full package they receive. You should invest in reports that are easy to read. Moreover, to make sure employees both actually read the reports and understand them, I highly recommend having managers present these reports personally. Leadership should never miss an opportunity to communicate with the people they employ.
Recruiting Efforts Benefit
Compensation Statements can help to close new recruits who might be considering offers from other companies. With compensation reporting solutions like COMPackage, you can actually show a potential new hire the full value of what he or she stands to earn with your company in real time, since it takes less than 6 minutes to prepare a single statement. Most employers who spend the money on generous benefits neglect to communicate how valuable their offer really is.
When I ran an advertising agency with over 100 employees, we were gracious employers, but had no good way to communicate it effectively. This was years before we developed COMPackage. There were solutions available, but they were expensive and required purchasing consulting and high priced handling to implement. COMPackage was built to be the easiest solution to buy, the easiest to prepare and the easiest to read!
A Total Compensation Statement Is Not a Legal Document
While Total Compensation Statements seem very official (and you should treat them with the care you would treat an official document), they are not true legal documents. They have no ties to government requirements and they are not used for tax purposes. The statements are simply used to display to your employees and recruits the total value of what you offer to them.
Conclusion
There are very reasonably priced solutions available, like industry leading COMPackage, where total compensation reports can be produced for as little as $10-$20 per employee depending on the number of employees and length of your contract. When I entered into this business and pioneered the self-service Total Compensation Statement solution, the costs of the alternatives were in the thousands of dollars per implementation, and that was for small companies – much more for large ones. I’m very proud that we’re still one of the lowest cost and easiest to use solutions available. I’m even prouder that our customer support is second to none.
Total Compensation Statements don’t have to be difficult. A professional program can help you deliver the goods for all your employees quickly and easily.
by Joe Blattner | August 26, 2015
Generous employee benefit packages are critical to attracting, motivating and retaining top talent. Benefit packages can add tens of thousands of dollars to an employee’s salary, giving them opportunities to maintain work-life balance, grow in their career, and take care of their health.
One innovative benefit that employees value highly is a significant employee education benefit. Here are some excellent reasons to add education benefits to your total compensation statement.
Demonstrate Employer’s Commitment to Employee Development
Whether the company reimburses undergraduate, graduate, or associates degree programs, the benefit clearly demonstrates the company’s willingness to invest in employees willing to invest in their own future.
The type of benefit each company offers varies according to the specific targets of the benefit.
For example, employers can offer tuition benefits and/or either partial or full reimbursement for course and/or book costs.
A second type of commitment is shown when employers offer flexible hours to allow employees to take courses during work hours, for example, rather than taking up only personal time. Flex time, or some option for telecommuting, are innovative responses to an employee’s needs when taking a challenging course load.
Improves Employee Performance
Employees who seek out job-specific education, like business degrees at the undergrad or graduate level, will translate their new skills into their daily job tasks. Any employer can target specific skills for employees to acquire through a tuition reimbursement plan.
The employer can take advantage of the employee’s new qualifications to improve their workplace rather than going through the costly process of recruiting new talent. If new hires are necessary, however, the education benefit can give companies the edge when recruiting. This is especially true for a small business trying to attract talent away from larger corporations.
Employees Can Grow with the Company
Employers that attract top talent are the ones that also help their employees to grow with the company. A recent study showed that 61% of survey respondents confirmed that they are more likely to stay with a company longer, up to five years, after taking advantage of educational benefits. The company benefits from their years of experience and new educational skills, while employees rise up the ranks.
The morale boost that comes with education benefits feeds into happier employees who work harder and are more likely to stay in your company. Even employees who choose not to take advantage of the benefit immediately, or who have no plans to do so in the near future, get the benefit of knowing that they can – and the morale boost that comes with working for a company they know cares about their future.
Health Benefits
Employers can offer courses that are in non-career areas, like smoking cessation or health improvement. These simple courses can lead to healthier employees, and that can translate into less sick time and consequently more productive employees.
Companies can also offer classes in work-life balance like stress reduction, which makes people more alert while working, or financial management, which contributes to better living as a result of increased savings and debt reduction.
Your company can learn about the many pluses of including an education benefit in your total compensation statement at compackage.com.
by Joe Blattner | August 1, 2015
A new report entitled, “2015 Workplace Flexibility Study,” surveyed 1087 professionals (employed and job seekers), and 116 HR professionals and found that 67% of HR professionals think that their employees have a balanced work-life, yet almost half (45%) of employees (35% of job seekers) feel that they don’t have enough personal time each week.
According to the report, sponsored by WorkplaceTrends.com, and CareerArc, giving employees the option to periodically work from home without coming into the office provides benefits to both employees and employers. “87% of HR leaders believe that workplace flexibility programs lead to employee satisfaction, while nearly 7 out of 10 HR leaders use workplace flexibility programs as a recruiting and retention tool.”
Most employers do not appear to be aware of how important workplace flexibility is to employees. Roughly 50% of employers ranked workplace flexibility as the most important benefit they believe their employees desire, compared to 75% of employees – who ranked it as the most important benefit!
But workplace flexibility isn’t only good for employee satisfaction. Employers also chalked up an increase in productivity, an increase in employee retention, and 54% said their workplace flexibility programs positively impacted their recruiting.
Total Benefits Reporting software tools like COMPackage.com, allow employers to really put a fine point on how workplace flexibility impacts an employee’s bottom line. The software has standard benefits reporting features such as charting the value of salary, bonuses, profit sharing, healthcare-related benefits, paid time off, and so on. Moreover, it has the ability to display, and value, custom benefits. For example, employers can show their employees the actual estimated dollar value of not having to pay for parking, gas, going out to lunch – even the value of the time saved by not having to spend 30 minutes twice a day commuting to and from work. While these things can be taken for granted, they can add up to thousands of dollars.
Employers not currently offering workplace flexibility might well benefit from taking a hard look at the hard dollars to be gained – both by the employer and the employees – in allowing employees to work from home. Workplace flexibility is clearly a burgeoning trend, and employers who don’t get on board might find themselves working harder than necessary to attract and retain top talent.
by Joe Blattner | July 6, 2015
Basing compensation around your business strategy ensures that you reward employees for work that has great benefits to your organization and increases the likelihood that you meet your goals. However, aligning the two can be more challenging that it first appears. To make sure that they are actually linked, you need to start at the very beginning, analyzing what both mean and entail.
What Are Your Business Goals?
Your business strategy is the way that you intend to enable your organization to grow. You should be able to define your strategy through a few short sentences that detail your business goals. Examples include increasing sales with current customers, expanding your client base, growing your product line, and entering a new market. To determine your business goals, identify your current strengths and weaknesses and consider whether you are straying from your mission or company philosophy.
The next step is to create objectives for the next three to five years: a combination of short-term and long-term financial and non-financial goals. Your business strategy entails identifying methods to confirm that you are moving closer to meeting these goals, which will enable you to reward the employees who played a role. Such means may include increased sales, better cost management, higher customer satisfaction, or greater productivity.
Bear in mind that your business goals are constantly changing, often without you noticing. Revisit your business strategy frequently to realign it to your compensation strategy.
Types of Compensation
A big concern for many companies when they hear the word “compensation” is cost. In fact, there are plenty of ways to retain employees and increase productivity by using a compensation method that keeps expenses low. Some such examples are:
- Creating a positive work environment.
- Offering reduced working hours.
- Developing customized benefits for individuals.
- Providing group rewards in addition to team incentives.
- Offering deferred compensation, like unvested stock.
Whatever you choose should be relevant to your organization’s philosophy and support your business strategy. However, it is also important to talk to employees and find out what they consider good compensation, which will avoid workers feeling undervalued for their work.
One of the best ways to stay on track with your compensation strategy is to use Total Compensation Reports from COMPackage. Our solution is suitable for organizations of every size. It features customizable templates to enter your data and it calculates benefits according to your business strategy.
Contact us a COMPackage to find out more about how you can simplify your compensation statements while ensuring that your business moves in the right direction.