compensation and benefits for small business
When it’s time for your company to go from a solo production to you plus others, it is an exciting time and a challenging one. Usually funds are a big consideration and in order to hire talent, you need to have competitive compensation and benefits for a small business. This can be an intimidating reality, but there are options if it’s time hire and you need to crunch the numbers.   Offering the biggest salary is not always the best strategy and it won’t help you keep anyone if that is all you are offering. High pay comes up short when vacation is scarce and benefits are meager. The entire package needs to be considered if you want to keep someone long term.  

Compensation And Benefits For A Small Business That Everyone Can Live With

  One of the first things you need to do is sit down and understand what you are hiring for and discern realistically how many hours you are expecting them to work per week. The reason why this is so important is that workers who are putting in 30 or more hours per week need to be offered insurance coverage under the ACA guidelines.   Before you get clever and think, “Well, I’ll just hire two people for under 30 hours to avoid that,” think again. The federal government takes the hours of all part-timers and combines the hours into 30 hour work weeks as “full-time equivalents.” You aren’t going to skirt the ACA requirements so taking the hours into account accurately and legally needs to be considered.   Once you have your hours figured out, it is time to get to how much you will need to offer for a salary in order to have serious candidates consider your position. Trying to go on the cheap will just yield a bunch of resumés from people who are neither qualified for the position nor able to commit to your role for the long term. No one who has the skills needed with the experience necessary is going to take low pay and want to stick around very long. As soon as something with better pay comes along, they are gone.   There are tools online to help you gauge how much you should expect to pay per year, based on industry and position:   Payscale.com -Payscale has some great wizards to help you figure out compensation and benefits for a small business based on position, experience, skills and geography. The information is very accurate and it should, they ask you for a lot of detail before you get an answer. Salary.com -This is a great site too. It takes less time to get the info you are looking for, but you have to put up with a lot of advertisements. They come recommended by Monster.com and you can get a free report or you can pay for a more detailed one, it is up to you. Roberthalf.com - A behemoth in the temporary employee space, Robert Half offers free salary guides to whomever wants them. That is, free after you meet with one of their sales reps in-person, they won’t mail them out. Still, they are very well done and exceptionally accurate.

Employee Benefits That Even You Can Live With

If thinking about offering benefits gives you a nervous twitch over finances, calm down. You have choices and they all don’t have to end with you not being able to make a profit this year. Most entrepreneurs who are looking to offer competitive compensation and benefits for a small business become overwhelmed with the numbers they find when they try to source the different plans they need on their own.   Retirement plans can seem insurmountable to be able to offer. That is just not true. Maybe you didn’t think you could offer a retirement plan, but you can. Good benefits are also not out of reach. PEOs can be very valuable in terms of offering what you want at a price a small business can afford. Better than that, they handle all of the HR functions so you don’t have to. Do you want to turn into an HR manager or grow your business?   PEOs have worked for thousands of small businesses every day and they can work for you too. There are also great resources for researching PEOs. PEO Spectrum has their own PEO comparison report so you can look at what different PEOs offer and what their fees are without spending a dime. Yes, you can have your cake and eat it too. If you are planning for 2016 and your new year includes new additions to your team, thinking about costs and mapping out solutions will help you get there faster and you can keep more money in your bank account than you thought as well.

If you’d like to find out more about how PEOs can help you provide great benefits and payroll management at less than you are paying now, contact us today for a free consultation.

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