As a business owner, you have to delegate in order to stay focused on the big picture. However, not planning far enough ahead for two important details – the annual renewal dates of your Workers’ Compensation and your Employee Benefits insurance policies – can severely limit your options to make a complete review of how to most efficiently and cost effectively stop these potential drains on your company’s profits.
We recommend that you proactively start looking in detail at both your Workers’ Compensation Insurance and your Employee Benefits plans long before your broker or carrier simply sends you your renewal packages. By then, it’s often too late to consider the variety of options you might have available to you to plug profit leaks in these two potentially budget busting areas. If you only give yourself a few weeks before your renewals, and you just use the same old approach of simply shopping rates, you are definitely missing the boat
Mark your calendar for 3 months in advance of the renewal date of both your Workers’ Compensation policy and your Employee Benefits plans. Then, use that extra time to take a look beyond just the rates on those insurance plans, but also take a strategic look at your HR practices and your 12-24 month business plan. By carefully considering the full picture of how your company operates and where you want your business to go, you may well find that you are creating the wrong incentives for your employees or that you won’t be able to attract and retain the right kind of talent needed to support you future plans.
This advance planning also gives you the time to engage an experienced HR professional to help you in this strategic analysis. The result may be some relatively simple changes in benefits plan design, some work attacking your workers’ comp loss history (a very controllable expense), or some changes to your policies and procedures to create the right incentives for your employees.
Or, as many small and mid-sized businesses are doing, this analysis might reveal that this is the right time to consider outsourcing some or all of your HR, employee benefits, and workers’ comp administration. By giving yourself enough time in advance of your renewals, you leave the door open to consider all of your options to keep your profits from swirling down the drain.
Whether it is a small, one time consulting project to help you conduct a strategic analysis, or a desire to increase efficiency, set the foundation for expansion, and lower costs and risks by offloading some or all of the administrative burdens of being a California Employer and focus on the business of your business, YPP can help.