In today’s work place employers are faced with the challenge of designing their employee benefit plan around the demographics of employees. How do we solve the challenge of designing a benefit plan to suit Baby Boomers and the needs of the X and Y Generations?
FLEX Benefits Are The Answer
Design a benefit plan around the specific needs of each demographic and let the employees decide which design suites their needs. When there is no restriction on the number of employees you can even offer a FLEX Plan with only 2 employees. Not all plans do that but ours do!
FLEX Plans can offer several Extended Health Care and Dental options which will resolve any disconnect between employees when it comes to plan options.
Related: 3 Mistakes Employers Make When Purchasing An Employee Benefit Plan
Treating Employees Equally
Another problem that employers face is the issue of how to treat employees equally financially when it comes to premium support for the employee benefit plan.
Traditionally, employers pay a portion of the premium. Let’s say 50% as an example. With this 50% financial contribution, is each employee treated equally? The answer is no. The single person and the employee with spousal coverage for family extended health or dental receives a lot less financial support than the employee with a family who will receive considerable support.
How do we solve this problem? The best solution is to budget an equal hourly amount to each employee. In my free eBook, 3 Mistakes Employers Make When Buying Employee Benefits, I point out budgeting as one of them.
For example if an employer can afford an hourly premium support of $1.75 per hour (per employee) then each employee is supported equally. The best part of the FLEX Plan is any monies not required to pay premiums is deposited into the employees RRSP plan we set up for them. Each month we collect the premium and pay it to their RRSP account.
Related: 4 Ways To Research Your Benefit Plan Consultant
Customizing Should Be Easy
Employee benefits consultants are able to design and implement a FLEX Plan to suit your employee needs within your budget, enabling you to treat all employees equally. Traditional group plans cannot achieve what a FLEX Plan can do.
Not only is this a cost effective approach to stabilizing employee benefit plan costs, it tends to make sense for organizations that have varying needs within the workplace.
Make sure that the money you spend is attracting, maintaining and retaining employees.
you are quite correct….flexibility is key……whether you are offering a safe harbour option….which ‘frees’ up the highly compensated to contribute to the max while providing the less well compensated…whether they choose to defer or not…..and making the profit sharing comparable….everybody ‘wins’ from plan sponsor to plan participant….
Does the FLEX plan work with Union employee groups?
Hi Lynne,
Flex plans do work with union employee groups as well.