How to Get Them Here Today and Prevent Them From Being Gone Tomorrow
Running your business is challenging, complex, and hopefully rewarding. Among the most complex and rewarding aspects of business are the people. Employee matters, especially compensation, can be frustrating and challenging for both employer and employee, particularly in the competitive hiring market we see today. Most of the people we’ve interviewed recently have told us that finding and retaining employees is especially difficult. Might you be worried that you’re not doing enough to keep your own employees happy in this market where they’re being wooed by lots of other companies? If your company is providing employee benefits like health insurance, which can be a critical component of overall compensation and employee satisfaction, have benefit costs gone up?
My friend Paul Rizzo, Vice President of Employee Benefits at Moody Insurance Agency, specializes in helping small and mid-sized companies control their benefit program costs, streamline employee enrollment and onboarding, and engage employees more in their benefit offerings. He recently shared with me some of his insights on these
matters. He said that businesses work with Moody Insurance Agency because they want to take good care of their employees and provide competitive benefit offerings.
Typically, the biggest piece of employee benefit packages is health insurance, which Paul believes is all about people. The inputs, processes, and outcomes all involve meeting with, gathering information from, considering and evaluating, and creating outcomes for the employee and the client. There’s no scale or ruler to measure these inputs, activities, and outcomes other than whether the client and the employee are happy. By maintaining his “people first” approach, Paul shared that he’s “gotten thanked a million times over” by happy clients and their employees.
Paul’s approach starts with assessing the client’s existing benefits, plans, and policies, finding out what are their goals, and implementing solutions to get them there. This process allows his team to find opportunities, identify gaps, and design improvements. By bringing the value of both improvement and innovation to his clients, Paul and his team provide custom benefit plans that usually enhance the benefit offerings and lower benefits costs.
As part of this unique approach, the Moody Insurance Agency provides its clients with tools to save time and make their lives easier. Moody offers clients the ability to switch from their existing manual, paper-based onboarding and enrollment processes to automated, electronic systems that not only reduce costs and errors, but also make benefit enrollment a better experience for employees. Moody Insurance Agency also has the resources to bring Fortune 500-style benefit programs and solutions to employers in the small to mid-size market.
“Insurance is confusing,” Paul says, and “we strive to be a trusted advisor on whom our clients and their employees can rely for clear, easy-to-understand explanations and guidance.”
One example of providing innovative and improved solutions that saved a client money is when Paul proposed a new and different type of health insurance plan. By just changing the funding of the benefits plan and implementing integrated cost management solutions to control claims costs, Paul and his team enabled the client to offer a more robust package at a much lower cost.
For another client, Paul and his team helped upload the client’s employee information to the Moody Insurance Agency online benefits administration platform, allowing the client to automate its employee onboarding process and benefits enrollment. This improved the client’s systems and processes, improved its communication with the employees, and allowed the employees to be more engaged in their benefit program offerings.
Paul recommends that the owners of small and mid-sized businesses look for an employee benefits partner who has access to the resources the client will need to meet their goals and for someone who has the client’s interests at heart. He also recommends finding an insurance partner who is well-connected and makes looking out for their clients’ businesses a priority.
Paul suggests performing an assessment of your company’s employee benefits offerings and costs every two or three years. “Things change fast in our industry,” he says. Paul also recommends benchmarking your business’ employee benefits offerings against similar companies in your industry and region to make sure your benefit programs are in line with the market. The assessment should include a compliance review. Much of what Paul does includes helping educate clients and their employees about new legislation, changing reporting requirements, and other compliance issues. Paul and his team enjoy the benefit of extra help with compliance questions because Moody Insurance Agency retains a lawyer (everyone’s favorite professionals) to help them stay on top of these changes. The Moody Insurance Agency also provides educational resources to its clients, including newsletters and webinars about insurance laws that have a direct impact on how you operate your employee benefits offerings.
If you think a relationship with Paul would benefit your business, please reach out to me. I’d be honored to connect you.
