After many hours and days of research, discussion, haggling, and even some heated shouting matches, tomorrow is Benefits Day at Visible Technologies.
This means that I have been able to follow through on a theme that is very important to me, add more value and create efficiency while reducing costs.
When I came on to Visible, one key area that is always in the forefront of an HR Manager’s mind is benefits. In my research and discussions, I was convinced we could get a better rate if we shopped our program around, and sure enough we did.
You see health care providers are like any other service industry – they want your business and are willing to cut their prices to get it.
Fortunately, we had a number of factors in our favor, we had surpassed the magic number of 50 employees thereby allowing us to transition from a shared cost plan that lumps small employers together to a stand alone insurance plan tailored to our own company. Tech companies tend to have a low risk profile and therefore are attractive to providers.
We managed to negotiate with a leading national provider to provide similar if not better service while savings the employees and the company over 13% on an annual basis. For those of you not familiar with the costs of health care in America, this is a significant amount of money even in a small to mid sized company.
In reducing costs, I was able to add more value by also adding some low cost, high return programs to our employees with the cost savings realized through the major medical transition including supplemental insurance, flexible savings account, and a commuter benefit program.
So with much fanfare, and the due diligence of meetings with teams and individual employees (medical transitions can cause significant turbulence without proper address, although we minimized this impact through our choice of providers), tomorrow is Benefits Day where we roll out the red carpet and add value our most valuable resource - our Employees.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
