outsourcing perhaps?

MS HR · July 2004

does anyone know of a good company to do some outsourcing of the following:
we would like to give each employee a list of their benefits with costs to the employer and with their hourly wage in order to show each of them their total compensation package as an hourly value. Has anyone had any good experience with doing this?

dlail · July 2004

Often, the companies through which you buy the benefits offer this service. If you have a cafeteria plan administrator, they may be a source; or if you have HR information system software, tech support could help you set that up.

We include a statement with W2 forms that lists employer portion of group health, term life, er portion of Fica and medicare and Futa and Suta taxes as an annualized number. We describe this total, which as a whole number is sizeable and averages 38% of compensation as "benefits paid on your behalf that are not taxable" . . . "These are paid in addition to your cash earnings and part of your total compensation package". We maintain this info in a spreadsheet and import to a letter format. (The spreadsheet is also used for cost accounting).

safety · July 2004

do a search on the top link within the forum under hidden paychecks.

MS HR · July 2004

>do a search on the top link within the forum
>under hidden paychecks.

i did that but only come up with my original post.
am i not doing something right?

POPEYE · July 2004

Check on the "Archived" threads.

Tammy Binford · July 2004

When you do the search, make sure you're searching in the Wage & Hour section of the Forum instead of the HR & Employment Law Questions section. I found it that way.

Tammy Binford
This Week's Forum Moderator

NM _Tom · July 2004

Like you we have found our fringe benefits increasing the past several years. It reached 40% this year. We just completed a similar excercise and called it a "total rewards statement" We did it in-house using PeopleSoft and our technical folks. We listed all wages separately (to include incentive pay, OT, etc) then we listed the company cost of the benefits, the value of the PTO and holiday pay, and gave a grand total.

Most of our exempt employees "got it" but it had little or no impact on our non-exempt. They really care about cash in hand at the end of the day and didnt care about how much their benefits cost. It wasnt an easy project to undertake, I would recommend you look at the cost/benefit before you do undertake such a project.

MS HR · July 2004

very good point.

and thanks to all who took the time to reply.

Don D · July 2004

Some of our non-exempts would 'get it'. Some would not. Some of our exempts would 'get it'. Some would not. Seems a bit unfair to categorize them so routinely. But, you would know.

I find out in our group meetings that there's no way to accurately who in which group will nod off or ask for additional information about what seems a totally boring subject. x:-)

NM _Tom · July 2004

It wasn't meant as a characterization of all non-exempts. Obviously I wasnt clear. It was a reflection of my experiences when we rolled this type of program out at our company and the impact it had on our non-exempts.

As I mentioned, he should carefully analyze his company and its culture prior to jumping in feet first and investing time or money. What type of company, where are you located, what is the average tenure of your workforce, do they like their benefits, what is your turnover, do people leave you for $.25 more an hour, etc, etc, etc.

If you have 75% turnover and an average tenure of less than a year, I wouldnt recommend that you undertake this project. It can be both time and labor intensive.

Just because you think it will be valuable, doesnt meant that your workforce will give two hoots about it. Ask people if they would like to see the total compensation they receive. If you decide to do it, find a way to incorporate it into your culture- i.e. each time you give a raise, reinforce the value of the benefits with a detailed worksheet that includes benefit contributions.

Don D · July 2004

I agree. Our company really obesesses about and overdoes shotgun presentations. Just today I got an email with the power point presentation for next month's Benefits Presentation. It's an annual benefits update. There were two icons. The first had 47 (Forty Seven!) complicated slides showing charts and tables and reasoning behind companies needing to up the costs. The second is 19 slides titled: What's Changing This Year. I'm sure we'll be instructed to walk through every slide with every employee in 9 groups. I'm also sure I'll probably forget to use the first Icon.

NM _Tom · July 2004

While I agree that it is important to educate employes on the rising cost of health care, I dont think this is the proper way to do it. In fact, it is a perfect example of how HR looses credibility in an organization. Any organization that can afford to have their employees be non-productive sitting through 66 slides, needs more accountants talking about ROI, productivity, etc. How absurd. Probably some "A hole" at corporate who is so far removed and doesnt have anything better to do than create presentations.

You could always say that the file was corrupt when you went to open it and apparently some material was inadvertently deleted (unknown to you of course- wink, wink)

marc · July 2004

Why resort to "skullduggery" when straight-forward feedback to the author might clear up excess detail in presentations for years to come? We in HR are famous for insisting that EEs work out their problems with the source but are reluctant to take our own advice?

NM _Tom · July 2004

Where's the fun in that?

Don D · July 2004

Marc: When one works in a corporation this large with multiple layer upon layer of bureacracy and an HR & Benefits empire that rivals the pentagon, one does not just shoot feedback to the author. Skullduggery is instant gratification. x:-) This is just one of hundreds of lengthy presentations that are required annually. Something to do with job justification...........hmmmm, mine included.

Dutch2 · July 2004

Sorry, don't know of an outside source. We did this ourselves a few years back and finally decided that the effort it took to pull it all together was not worth the preceived value. By the time we looked at each employee seperately to see if they had ee only coverage, ee and spouse, ee and child(ren) or full family coverage for each plan, listed each payroll area (OT, Holiday pay, vacation, bonus, company 401(k) contributions, etc.)we had spent many mnay hours pulling it all together. Then after just a few years of attempting to present this information to all in a positive manner it appeared to fall on deaf ears so we discontinued the practice.
Good luck,
Dutch2

MS HR · July 2004

thanks everyone.
i found an outside source in california that will do everything for about $12 per employee.
it's call fringefacts.com at 1-800-533-1388

Don D · July 2004

And, do consider the fact that for them to do this for you will require that someone at your company spend a ton of time gathering information and electronically providing it to the vendor. And they'll want it in a certain format and they'll require certain things you don't currently track. Then they'll want it updated periodically, including people who terminate or get increases, on and on. But, hope it works for you. As someone implied earlier, the bottom line should be a cost-benefit analysis. It's gonna drive one person absolutely nuts!

AJ SPHR · July 2004

Yes - to echo what Don said, that even if you have an outside to produce the reports, you must spend an inordinate amount of time finding the data to give them and also you essentially come up with the programming needed to produce the reports.

We created our own last year using Access and mail-merge in Word and since we already captured all the data we needed in our HRIS, it was not too difficult to be able to produce them. They weren't as fancy as some that can actually exclude certain benefits if the employee is not enrolled, but we're relatively small so we could do our own customization.

I agree with others that perceived value may be in our eyes and upper mgmt's eyes, but now that we have the template, we will continue to produce them for the few who enjoy receiving them.

qsausagelm · July 2004

We did this about ten years ago. Never again. It took a lot of time explaining to our EE's that the Company's subsidies could not be paid to them instead.

pork1 · July 2004

What a remarkable and insightful statement!!! The exact reaction, that we got when we did the same "dawg work" flushing out all the information and putting it in a format so easily read that it was a no brainer for everyone; however, explaining why "we could not just simply pay the additional labor cost to the individual" drove us to delete the spreadsheets and attempt to forget we ever tried to get it right and of importance to the labor force and their families. We even had to explain to the spouses individually because the ee was not able to articulate the data nearly, as well as we; we had put it in their paycheck envelope. That way the spouse would understand, why it was important for the ee to stay working with our company!

Pork

The ees did not eat enough PORK, so they were not so smart. I might try it again in my next life.

outsourcing perhaps?

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