Offering Employee Benefits in Three Easy Steps
Offering employee benefits for the first time is an exciting milestone. Your small business is growing and you’re looking to attract more employees and retain them for the long-haul. But it can also be a big financial commitment, so you may find that you’d prefer to ease your way into it. A digital employee benefits platform like Honeybee makes it easy to start with three easy steps that you can take at your own pace.
If you’re ready to improve the lives of your employees and your business, start with step one and work your way to steps two and three as your company grows.
Step 1 – Open a free Honeybee Allowance Account
Think of a Honeybee Allowance Account as a bank account you can open for each of your employees. You fund each of your employees’ accounts with a monthly allowance to use towards lifestyle benefits. The amount you choose to provide them is up to you, but the accounts themselves cost no fee to use.
You decide what services or products your employees can use their allowance dollars towards. You can add as many or as few categories as you’d like, or even create your own. This helps you choose benefits that will complement or help create your workplace culture.
For example, if you want to cultivate a wellness-focused culture, you can create a fitness and wellness category that lets employees use their allowance towards activities such as fitness and meditation classes, health coaching, therapy, and holistic healing. There are, however, many options to choose from, from health-related categories to those that fall under the realm of financial wellness, recreational activities, and time-saving assistance, to name a few.
Lifestyle benefits are designed to improve the work-life balance of your employees and create a healthier and happier culture at work. They’re also the easiest way to start offering digital benefits, because they offer cost containment while complementing traditional plans.
Step 2 – Add on a Honeybee Health Account
Once you’ve started with the Allowance Account and are ready to provide health and medical benefits through a digital platform, consider upgrading your Honeybee plan to include a Health Account. This is essentially a Health Spending Account (HSA) that helps pay for health care services for your employees and their families.
How does it work? Well, if we go back to the online banking analogy, this would be considered another bank account that you deposit money into as an employer. Each of your employees would get a Health Account funded by you to use towards any eligible medical expenses. Some common expenses include prescription drugs and glasses, paramedicals (like massages and therapy), ambulance fees, and dental treatments, amongst many others. Your advisor can help to recommend the appropriate level of funding to best balance your employees’ needs with your budget considerations!
One of the advantages of an HSA is that unlike traditional insurance plans, your annual costs are fixed and predictable – they don’t change unless you decide to provide more or less funding for your employees. It’s perhaps one of the most affordable ways to offer your employees medical coverage. Plus, it gives your employees the flexibility to use their coverage towards the health and medical expenses that fit their needs, which a traditional plan cannot offer.
Step 3 – Include Additional Insurance Protection
Once you feel comfortable enough to fully upgrade your benefits, you can speak with an advisor to help determine which insurance products to add on. The great thing about Honeybee is that the amount you’ve funded in each of your employees’ Health Accounts will cover most of the monthly insurance premiums (costs of the insurance products).
Some common insurance products that employers add to their employee benefits include:
- A medical plan – providing coverage for expenses like prescription drugs, semi-private hospital, ambulance, medical equipment, and more
- A dental plan – for routine cleanings, plaque removal, exams, and more
- Travel coverage – which could cover a range of things from prescription drugs to trip cancellation to baggage insurance
Other valuable products Honeybee provides
You can also provide other benefits that can add value to your overall plan. These include:
- On-Demand Virtual Doctors – This let’s your employees and their families have access to a certified practitioner from anywhere via video call or chat, rather than having to waste time waiting at their local walk-in clinic.
- Employee Family Assistance Program (EAP) – This gives your employees and their families access to confidential resources and services to help support work and personal well-being, like financial planning, professional counselling, nutrition support, health and stress coaching, and more.
- Best Doctors – For employees or their family members dealing with a chronic or critical illness, Best Doctors connects them with the right experts to help come up with the best diagnosis and medical treatment plan.
Getting started with employee benefits doesn’t have to be so complicated. In fact, digital platforms like Honeybee make it so easy to offer your employees the benefits that fit their needs and will help keep them healthy and happy at work. You can start with lifestyle benefits and work your way to offering more comprehensive health and medical coverage whenever you’re ready.