Looking for a Way to Lower Employee Health Insurance Costs? These 5 Tips Will Help
Health insurance premiums are soaring, and many small business owners are considering asking their employees to take on a greater financial burden or cutting benefits entirely. Do you feel like health insurance for your business is taking a huge chunk out of your revenue? It may seem like that, but benefits often attract better employees and help retain existing workers. Satisfied and healthy employees are more likely to help your business grow. But if you’re struggling to provide health insurance, here are some tips and hints that could reduce your health insurance costs.
5 Tips to Reduce Employee Insurance Costs
1. Safety Incentive Programs: Providing health insurance benefits are important for employee retention and happiness, and since company success rests on the performance of employees, it’s important to keep them happy!
And healthy. Structured safety incentive programs—which reward employees for meeting milestones with things like special promotional incentives are helping employees set, meet and exceed goals, and helping companies attract and retain valuable talent. And all this while keeping them from injury, which is bad for them and costly for the company. We work with businesses to help them create safety incentive programs that work so feel free to reach out to us HERE to request more information on how we can help your business.
2. Communicate Effectively: Simple, open communication goes a long way. If your employees feel like you’re confiding in them and are open to their suggestions (as long as they’re reasonable), they will be more apt to stay and produce quality work. Furthermore, if you must reduce your coverage to save money, a policy of open communication and reasoning is a wise path to take. Indirectly, effective communication could save you more than almost any other tip we throw your way.
3. Company Wellness Programs: Like a safety incentive program, wellness programs run the scope from offering employees free gym memberships to providing healthy snacks in the company kitchen and health screenings that can result in lower insurance payments for employees. This works well for office jobs that are less physically hazardous and more likely to affect wellness if employees aren’t active.
4. Health Savings Accounts: Health savings accounts are a popular option for small business owners. These tax-exempt accounts, which are used to pay for certain medical expenses, could reduce your business’ health insurance costs while giving your employees tax breaks.
5. Don’t Settle. There isn’t just one health insurance policy out there. If you’re unsatisfied with your options, shopping around for different providers could reduce your small business health insurance costs by finding at better offer. Ask other entrepreneurs and business owners what they pay for health insurance, and don’t discount insurance agents. They will charge fees, but you’ll save time and they can investigate health insurance plans for you, helping you find the best option available.
Take Care of Your Employees
We hope these were some helpful hints that could significantly help business owners make employee insurance costs more manageable. We recommend always taking care of your employees and finding ways of offering benefits. After all, you wouldn’t be a business without them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take a chunk out of your spending. Let us know what you think about these tips in the comments below or in any of our social channels. Keep the conversation going!
A Special thanks to Scott McKnight for his input on this article.
