Words Into Action—Equitable Access and Choices in Benefit Offerings
Brit Morse: Hi. How is everyone. It’s great to see some shining faces in the audience. Like they mentioned, I’m Brit. I’m an associate editor at Inc. Magazine here in New York City and it’s wonderful to see you all today. We’re here to talk about workplace benefits, which obviously TriNet is really one of the leading figures in today’s benefit market and I have two absolutely incredible humans to talk to today. We have Samantha Wellington and Alex Warren who I’d love to bring out onto the stage.
Samantha Wellington: I’m super impressed you made it down the ramp.
Brit: Oh my God, that was so impressive. I thought I was going to fall. Thank you very much. I wore the wrong shoes today for sure, absolutely.
Samantha: I didn’t even try.
Brit: Well it’s wonderful to have you both here. Samantha Wellington is the executive vice president of Business Affairs and TriNet’s chief legal officer. Alex Warren is our senior vice president of Customer Experience at TriNet and I would love to have you both sort of mention a little bit more about what you do for TriNet. Samantha, if you wouldn’t mind engaging, that would be great.
Samantha: Sure. So we focus on helping our clients run compliant companies. We focus on helping customers utilize the scale that we have to compete on a level playing field with larger companies and what a lot of larger companies have is very large legal and compliance departments that small businesses do not have. So a core part of what we add value to with our customers is the work that my team does. So my team then works very closely with Alex’s team in getting close to the customer, working out what’s happening at the customer level, what the customers are looking at or needing and then translating that into solutions for customers.
Brit: And Alex, you are the customer guy as I have been told and also their chief video man who speaks to the customers. Would you mind telling them a little bit more about what you do?
Alex Warren: Yeah, so the organization that I oversee starts to engage with customers right as they are coming on board with us. And then all of the services that we provide to our customers in any shape or form is rolling up through the organization. The big piece to us is not just the day-to-day tactics of how we’re delivering, but also how we manage and interact and how we retain our customers, which keeps us attached with them every day trying to understand, battling with them to understand how we can help them succeed.
Brit: Now, really the benefit market has gotten so complicated as of late, especially with our transition from the pandemic, from our transition to work from home and employees are really in the driving seat. They want to know what they can be offered. They want to know what they have and they’re taking benefits more seriously than perhaps they ever had moving forward, especially as many are really reevaluating what they want in life. So tell me, why is it so important to talk about benefits right now? Why should companies really prioritize benefits for their workplace?
Alex: Well, I think this speaks to a conversation we have around the strategy of the benefits that you offer to your employees. Fifteen years ago, 20 years ago, benefits were just a thing that you offered that had a cost associated with it. You got a renewal, you tried to negotiate that down. That has become very different and since COVID. It has very much changed, which is how do I attract, retain the talent I want? How do I make the benefits more inclusive because one pandemic happened. So the question is there’s this thing going on, I need to figure out how to engage in healthcare in a completely unique way and then after that, as Burton, our CEO had said that the great reassessment came into play where people are looking at their organizations and seeing if how they think about the world and the things that are valuable to employees and to include their own values are in that one large lever of the benefits that you provide.
Samantha: And they aligned. Yeah, I think the conversation about benefits has become much bigger. So it used to be benefits used to be healthcare, it’s what it meant. Now it includes things like elder care, childcare, what else? How else do you facilitate me pursuing my passion. How do you as an organization, how do your values align with the thing that I really want out of my life? Which is the great reassessment piece, I think.
Alex: And I think it became more complicated on the 24th of June when the Dobbs decision is handed down, which further shows that much of the insurance market that people can interact with very easily are for large companies. But small businesses have a completely different opportunity or lever that they have to play within. That further changed and created a whole conversation that employers may or may not have wanted to have. I mean you’re now talking about things are changing. Are you covering this? I want these things to be aligned to how I feel and I think that is an additional piece to not just how you engage, but also this change makes it difficult for small employers and small businesses to actually react.
Brit: Right and one of the things you mentioned in just an earlier conversation that we had was that benefits are really, especially in this country made for larger businesses. They’re designed for smaller businesses, especially those under self-insured plans, but we’re talking about small businesses. We’re talking about businesses that most necessarily don’t have a large amount of funds. So I mean why are the smallest businesses, why is it so crucial for them specifically to offer such benefits?
Samantha: Well, it’s about how you speak to your talent. I think it’s about if you think about the talent marketplace and truly being able to access the best talent for your business, this is part of what your potential employees expect. They expect you to have an offering that is on par with those very large companies that they may have previously worked for or that you are competing against in order to access them and the market just is not set up that way. The market just is not set up because also frankly, the world of an employer has gotten so much more complicated over the last 20 years because it used to be the case that you were headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and all of your employees came from Atlanta, Georgia, and that was the state you needed to worry about. Whereas now, your employees could be anywhere across the country and that means that you’re also competing with employers all across the country as well to access the talent.
Alex: And to add to that, I think there’s this idea that a small business was a place for individuals that worked in large companies could go and thrive and innovate with the passions of founders and new concepts, but there was always this idea that I needed to have the same kind of benefits that I had at that larger company and as the time has gone on, those larger businesses have more and more things that they can do that small businesses just can’t. And so that is the challenge now for a small business, which is how do I anchor on garnering the talent I need to be successful and grow my business?
Samantha: This is fascinating. There’s a poll going on at the moment.
Brit: I just saw that.
Samantha: So there’s a poll going on at the moment. It says our benefits offering’s more important to your employees since the pandemic and I can’t read that number because it’s too far away, but it’s a very large red bar.
Alex: It’s more than 50.
Brit: Let’s see. It’s 82% say yes and 18% say no. So it’s a pretty high percentage.
Samantha: And I think it’s a lot to what you were talking about, Brit. There’s so much about we spend a bunch of times in our homes reassessing what’s important to us and that larger conversation about benefits, that bigger thing that isn’t just healthcare, it’s not just care. I tend to think about it as a very large thing. It’s about your entire employee engagement strategy really, but benefits are such an important part of your employee engagement strategy, I think.
Alex: Sorry, this is a bit of an anecdote, but I think this will play well, which is 15 years ago when we would enroll our customers employees into benefits, there was always one person that was going to ask a question that was specifically because of the benefit plan that they had before and didn’t offer something they needed it. And there was always one that was the hard person to deal with because they’re asking you all these questions about does it cover this or doesn’t it cover that? Well since COVID, that’s pretty much every company we go to. They’re now asking, “Will it cover this? And what about that and does it cover COVID testing?” And they’re becoming more engaged in the benefits because they had more time to actually think about it and I think sitting at home gave people the ability to watch TV and listen and learn about things that they didn’t know about before.
Brit: Yeah, one thing I actually recently wrote about for Inc. was the fact that many companies right now are starting to pull back on benefits that they started offering during the pandemic. One of which being parental leave and offering those benefits to new parents, whether it’s new parents trying to conceive or trying to adopt, etc., and I think many people are waking up and because they spent so much time with their families realizing that they need these kind of benefits. In those cases, do you think that small businesses have an advantage to really step in here and say, “Well, we can offer more than what some larger companies may.”
Samantha: There’s certainly an opportunity. I would say the last thing you’d pull back on is, but I get it. I understand the instinct that says, I’m nervous about the immediate economic future and I’m trying to curtail costs in various places that I understand the instinct. But now more than ever is where you leapfrog, right? Now is where you have your employees double down. The best employees, you want them double down on your mission and your vision so that you can actually take advantage of the situation that we’ve currently got in the economy and so now is when you want to be doubling down on benefits, not pulling back on them and to your point, if larger companies are pulling back on parental leave, well okay, you’ve got less employees. It’s actually going to cost you less money to add an extra two days or whatever it happens to be. Two days is probably not enough.
Alex: And I think it does have a lot to do with, “Look, we’re not in the days where people show up to their company and work there for 40 years and retire and they’re done.” In a marketplace where people want to be engaged, they want reasons to work for their companies. They want that passion and vision, mission, vision, values, old concept that kind of went out of vogue, but it’s now really part of understanding why I work for your company. How do you capture that with your employees? And these types of benefits and offerings are the things that they care about, which is what they said in the great resignation.
I’ve worked 20 hours a day during this whole pandemic. I want time with my kids or I want to learn how to do other things. That’s what I think caused many employees to pull back and start asking questions of their employers like, “What do you do around this? Can you offer me that?” And so, I would strongly recommend it. It’s a huge line item. It’s typically your largest line item outside of your gross payroll or your costs associated with healthcare. The more they’re engaged, the more they participate, the better chances you have to contain your cost of healthcare, but the better chance you have to retain your most valuable talent. And in a recession, that’s the key to making it through it.
Brit: Now Samantha, I want to touch on something that very well and that are sort of the legal complexities around benefits and I think this is one of the largest hurdle for the smallest businesses, especially those who may have really small HR departments. It can be overwhelming. All the legal complexities and as with you said, with the Dobbs decision and with other benefits as well. So really what is the best way to approach these legal issues?
Samantha: Don’t try and do it yourself and whether that means you use TriNet or not, whatever, but don’t try and do it yourself. One of the conversations we were having in the context of Enrich Access, which is the travel product was around, “Well, why can’t I just cut a check?” If I want to do this, why can’t I just cut a check? And one of the challenges that no small business is going to think of in that context is, “Well because you’re probably inadvertently creating a healthcare plan that’s subject to the ACA and requires you to make certain filings. It’s going to create you a whole bunch of tax complexity.” But you don’t even know that, right? So you’re creating challenges for yourself that you don’t even realize are out there and I think that’s really the danger because when things go badly with healthcare benefits, you’re dealing with people, your employees at a really vulnerable time.
It’s a really vulnerable period when you’re trying to rely on your healthcare plan to do a thing for you or you’re trying to rely on this benefit that was going to help you and if you’ve done it incorrectly and it didn’t work, then you’ve not only lost an employee or created liability for your company, but you’ve potentially destroyed a human’s life or potentially made it really difficult for that human to continue to live. So benefits, they’re so important and frankly, I do think that there’s a bit of a challenge in saying to employers, “Actually, you are going to bear the burden of this very important thing for humans.” And I think it’s not easy enough, but it’s something that large companies can do. It is very difficult for small employers to do.
Alex: And I have the perfect story around this. So when the Dobbs decision happened, a customer called, spoke to Burton, our CEO, and said, “Hey, I need to figure out what we’re going to do with this thing.” And Burton said, “Well, here’s what we’re going to do, which was very similar to large companies.” Just every Twitter feed, any person on social media, “Hey, we’re going to do X, Y and Z.” And rightfully so, Derek said, “Well, I can’t do that.” So how are you going to make something for me work? And that is the challenge of small businesses, which is the worst-case scenario is they saw it and said, “Well, I’ll just do the same thing and cut a check.” And we had quite a few customers saying, “Why can’t I just cut a check?” And as Samantha’s already said, but the reality is there aren’t resources available for small businesses to compete at that level, but they’re being required to.
Brit: And I also think too, if those of you who aren’t familiar with Enrich Access, it’s a really valuable program. Samantha, if you want to just mention a little bit as to what it is.
Samantha: Sure, so Enrich Access is designed to allow, or it does allow a small business to fund travel that’s necessary to access medical services that are either not available close to their home or not legally available close to their home and it was important. It was important at the particular point in time that we created it, it remains very important and I think it’s far more like it came up obviously in the context of the Dobbs decision because there was a lot of social media sort of conversation happening around what larger companies were doing.
But I think it’s really important regardless, in so far as the solution is not limited to solving for that particular issue. It also facilitates for anyone who’s been through IVF and knows what that is and understands the expense of traveling to access IVF. For anyone who’s had a relative that has this particular type of cancer and they can’t access treatment for that cancer inside of a particular radius, it can get really expensive to continue to travel and access those medical treatments and that’s what the Enrich Access product solves for. It allows employers to fund that in a tax effective way.
Alex: And it’s attached to the other product which is Enrich Adopt, which was trying to not just solve a single problem, but as many as we can to talk about, “Look, this is for your culture. You have the ability to pick and choose the right product or service that makes the most sense for your culture, for the people that work for you.” And so being able to roll both of those out at the exact same time to solve a problem in the marketplace for a small business, I’d like to think that we’ve done a better job than most large companies did when they put their... And we saw that in some of the lawsuits that came about almost instantly after many people posted this is what we’re doing on Twitter. We saw some very large organizations get wrapped into lawsuits. We’ve really thought through that to give ourselves the ability to provide a service to small businesses so that they can stay ahead of where they want to get talent.
Samantha: And I think it’s really around allowing a small business to make a choice and a statement if that’s what they choose to make around who they are as an organization. Who I am as a company, these are the people who work for me, they’re important for me to me in these ways and I’m going to show them that. I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and I’m going to actually take a conscious act to say, “You are important to me.” And if we talk about employee engagement and this idea of great reassessment and how important employee engagement is particularly for small businesses and particularly right now, benefits are a really powerful way to have that conversation with your employees to actually show employees rather than just there is benefit in very nice websites and there is benefit in having very attractive recruitment mechanisms and all the rest of it, but there’s a lot more benefit I think in actually showing people that you thought about it and did something very intentional.
Brit: Yeah, I think one of the most important elements of this product in particular and other products like it are the fact that it’s not just for people traveling to various states in regards to reproductive benefits, but it’s really for medical benefits in general and I think that’s a really interesting way to do it especially because it makes it more inclusive for people regardless of where they are, where they’re trying to go, what kind of medical procedure and part of that when it comes to covering medical procedures is the anonymity of it. The keeping everything anonymous and so Samantha, I want to talk to you a little bit about why that is so important when it comes to these kind of benefits.
Samantha: So actually it was one of the prime challenges or opportunities that we were solving for that customers told us you need to solve for this because they don’t want to know. A customer wants to be able to say to their employees, “I am here for you. I have thought about you. I’ve been intentional in the way in which I’ve constructed your benefit package, but I don’t necessarily need to know how and when you’re using it.” And so the anonymity piece I think is incredibly important from that perspective. Frankly, it’s also important given some of the litigation that we’ve seen already. I think it’s also important from that perspective to allow people to believe, have faith that they’re being protected as best as we can.
Alex: And we had a client, one of our first conversations were, “My employees have told me I don’t want to come to you and give you receipts and I don’t want to take the receipts. I actually don’t want to know.” And we’ve talked about that specific narrow issue around access because Dobbs has taken a conversation that has never really been discussed in the workplace and now said, “You’ve got to answer these questions or provide something that makes it so you don’t have to answer the questions.” And so we designed it with that in mind, which was to provide the anonymity to the employee and the employer and manage that in such a unique way so that an employer still doesn’t necessarily have to have the conversation, but can provide something to say we’ve got something as an offering.
Samantha: And before you got to anonymity, you used the word inclusive and you were speaking about it with references and benefits, and I want to kind of go there if we can because I think that you also said before Dobbs, we weren’t really having this conversation in the workplace. I think before the pandemic, we weren’t really having this conversation. I think we started to have the conversation through the course of the pandemic and Dobbs just sort of exacerbated it in a very big way. And I think this concept of inclusive benefits and thinking about benefits in a very different way to how we might have seven years ago, they mean something very different for people now.
And I truly believe that it is a way to walk the talk in a way that really speaks to employees and is meaningful. We are seeing, it’s a thing that people ask now when they come to work for you. Before they even get as far as I’m giving you an offer and I’d like you to come work for me. In the first interview, they’re asking questions about infertility benefits. They’re asking questions about how do you think about elder care in your organization? That’s a real thing that’s happening in the marketplace that particularly younger in career talent are really paying attention to because they see it as a very tangible way of working out whether or not that mission, vision, values that are on your company website actually means something inside the company.
Brit: And it also goes into the element of culture too. How you are able to support your culture and I think there’s a really interesting element of trust there as well. That especially even just going back to the medical benefits portion of this, that if you trust your employees to just give you those receipts, if you trust your employees to just take these benefits and use them, there’s a level of communication and there’s a deepening there that I think is really an interesting part of culture and Alex, I know you have something to say about that. You’re our culture guy.
Alex: Yeah, I mean I think this is going to... I’ve always seen the world as a silly equation that I’ve always used, which is TC—the total capacity of any person that works for you is made up of two things. The minimum requirements of the job, that’s what employers own, that’s their day-to-day and how much you’re going to pay them to perform a task and the other portion of that is the discretionary effort of the employees, the person that works for you and the employee owns that. And your culture needs to attach to that because they own it. You could spend all day long trying to figure out how to make somebody answer a phone, but at 5:00 when the day is done, how do you make the employee pick it up at 5:01 or 5:02 and respond to a need that helps their customer?
And that ultimately is this effort that is tied to culture and we’re seeing nowadays more than ever. I think one of the levers around benefits, as Samantha was saying, is it is a huge lever that can be pulled. It has real attached value. It’s very easy to explain. There are lots of other things you can do with your culture, but it’s really easy to say, “My mission, vision and values are these and these are the types of people I want working for me.” And I do think there’s another piece; I’m very passionate about this. I think another piece about this is COVID changed the world for businesses.
What was once a business that had someone in one location like you said, Atlanta doesn’t exist anymore. You’ve got employees that are everywhere and just because you happen to live in Texas, doesn’t mean you don’t have employees in California and you’re going to have to figure out how to get those people to work for you and vice versa and as a small business, you want to go wherever the talent is. We learned how to work remotely. Right, wrong or indifferent, it worked and maybe there is a piece of talent that’s out there in Atlanta, Georgia that you want, but they’re going to ask these questions now that they never did before and that’s where your culture is built. That’s how you do it. Brick by brick.
Brit: Check out that poll if you take a look at it. Do you see benefits as an element of your company culture? 93% say “yes.” So yes, they do and I think benefits are just a great way to translate what you actually mean. I mean you could say you really support women in the workplace, but if your benefits don’t support women in the workplace, are you actually supporting them? And that’s just putting your money where your mouth is at that point and I do want to talk a little bit more about the customer experience and how customers have really engaged with this product. Alex, can you just chat a little bit with me about this? What has their reaction been? What has the experience been to Enrich Access, Enrich Adopt, etc.?
Alex: Really positive. And so we were always concerned that we had to get out there and figure out if there was going to be anybody that would be frustrated by us doing this and we didn’t hear any of that. Initially, what we heard was the largest customers that had people in multiple states were trying to figure out how to operate and for those of you that haven’t seen our webcasts, what we talked about is you went from a single narrative, a single rule that now has become 50. And regulation on small business is the biggest killer and so now there are 50 different places that have 50 different rules that you’re going to have to figure out. And in a world where you can’t just all work in one state anymore, this is a complexity that most small businesses want and need help with and so our largest customers instantly came to us and said, “This is really good, how do we talk about it? How does this thing work?”
And now we’re getting more and more smaller customers coming to us. I’ve had quite a few amazing conversations with customers that have said, “I don’t think my employees are ever going to use this, but I want to make a stance so that my employees know where I stand.” Which was an interesting conversation on this issue and I’ve had quite a few customers that have contacted us from various states saying, “Thanks, this is amazing. This helps me attract and keep my talent.” And it answers a question I’ve been getting since the day it happened because we did it relatively quickly within 30 days of the decision, we had something within 30 days.
Brit: 30 days. Wow, that’s very fast, but it seems like you had to have a customer that you did it because of them. It wasn’t just something that you did randomly.
Alex: No, it was in response to the almost instant conversations. The very first Monday after the decision that morning, we had 40 people already calling us, customers calling into our centers asking questions. By the end of that day, it was 400 and then it just continued to exponentially grow and so one of the things we pride ourselves with is from our teams and myself and others that are in the experience teams, call customers and talk to them. So we were engaged with multiple customers, 40 or so to say, “What do you think? Does this work? Do you like this?” And continued to talk through to make sure we were building something that they wanted.
So I think that was really a critical piece for us. This product was specifically designed because our customers asked us to do it. We deployed it in 30 days and we didn’t just solve one piece of it because I think the first initial reaction is I need you to help me with Dobbs, and as Samantha said, it wasn’t just to solve Dobbs, it was to solve medical access. So, it was much broader because we think strategically on behalf of our customers to say, “This can be more.” And then it became Enrich Adopt and so on and on as we go.
Brit: And I want to mention something that you sort of brought up in there as just the evolution of these products. I mean where is TriNet going? What is the future and what’s next?
Alex: Sure. We want to and are the trusted advisor to small and medium-sized businesses and our goal is not just to provide few services here and there. Our goal is to try to figure out how we can continue to evolve, create products, create services to help small and medium-sized businesses thrive, grow and succeed in today’s marketplace.
Samantha: With relevant solutions. With solutions that are relevant to you.
Brit: You have something else to tell us, don’t you?
Samantha: I do. So when we designed Enrich, we did it in such a way that it was able to be deployed against multiple different use cases and we thought that was super important because that’s how we bring scale to the benefit of small and medium-sized businesses. That’s how we do that and we wanted to ensure that we’re always being relevant to customers and we’re helping customers engage with their employee base. So today, the exciting thing that we’re announcing is Enrich Learn, which is a new product in the Enrich product line. It is designed to provide or allow employers to provide educational assistance. So it’s an educational assistance program that isn’t designed to help your employees do the job they currently do or get better at working for your company. It’s intentionally designed as an educational assistance program that allows you to support any educational cost.
So supplies, tuition, student loan reimbursement, any of those things that you want to support as an employer that really speaks to who your employees are and what their passion is because if you think about that concept of employee engagement, how do I get people to really want to be vested in this company, in this mission that I’m driving? Part of how you do it is being invested in them and being invested in the things that drive your employees. Not everyone is an entrepreneur. Not everyone is a person who wakes up every day and says, “That’s the thing I’m going to achieve.” Some of your employees show up at work so that they can go and volunteer on the weekends or so that they can do the thing that drives their personal passion, but you need those folk to be invested in your business just as much as you are. So for the time that they’re giving you the discretionary effort, you really want to be getting that discretionary effort and part of how you can do that, I really believe is by helping to fund education that helps them grow.
Brit: And I’d also like to add to that by the way. This is the first time this product has been mentioned ever live on stage right now. So yes, you’re welcome.
Alex: Well, Samantha’s been dying to announce something in one of these meetings. So I think there’s an added piece of this. I do think the idea of look, we know that five people that work for your company are buried in the day-to-day and this is what they live for and this is who they are. And five and 10 really go to work so that they can go do the things they want to do in their lives. How do we get that number? Well, we know that roughly when the great resignation was starting to be put out there, 50% of the people that work for your businesses for large companies as well as small, were shopping or leaving and so does this quiet quitting. All of this stuff is happening in the marketplace, so we know that you need to find a way to engage with your employees.
And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this sort of idea of creating the ability, one for companies to help reimburse student loans on behalf of their employees is a fantastic way to get talent, especially people coming out of college right now, which you’re looking for. But also this idea of I’m a baker, I want to learn how to bake, but I know I’m never going to own a bakery, but I’d love to find a way to take a series of classes to do that. Well, being able to give that to somebody only further allows that person, like I’m a baker to say, “I love this company because they helped me fulfill that. So I’m going to give more to my company because they kind of get me and they’re helping me expand who I am as a person.” And that’s why I work for this company.
Brit: And I think it’s interesting because there is this old school mentality for such a long time where people thought, “Oh, if I invest in someone’s education, if I invest in their outside classes, it means they’re trying to leave.” It means they’re trying to go somewhere else. It means they’re done with working here, but I think what businesses are finding now is that that’s not necessarily the case. That people want to be able to do their outside lives just as much as they want to be able to work, just as much as they want to be able to contribute to your organization and I think having both at the same time is something that while we’re all learning, I’m not great at work-life balance myself, but we’re all figuring out how to do that. And I think people woke up during the pandemic and realized they wanted to learn how to bake sourdough instead of sitting on a computer all the time. Exactly.
Alex: And I think that that does speak to this idea of, “Look, you’re not going to capture your talent by paying the money.” I mean that’s a piece of it and most employers, small businesses and large businesses when interviewed think that paying money is how they capture discretionary effort and that’s not how you get it. It’s a piece of why people work. They want to fill in on the culture. They want to be part, they want to be understood. They want to be cared for, so they want to be valued and so the idea that you give them the ability to get their value outside of their job makes it far less likely that they’re going to leave.
**Brit:**Yeah.
Samantha: And I think there’s a whole conversation about to total compensation, right? So yes, the money I pay you is part of your compensation, but so is all of the other staff and so all of we’ve been talking about today, this concept of benefits and how big is benefits? It’s bigger than just health, but how big is it? All of it is part of the lever that you can pull. It becomes part of your total compensation conversation when you’re thinking about either starting to work for a company, right?
Because I think workers have become far more savvy about understanding what is the total compensation and how does that work. But also as an employer, if you are proactively talking about the full value that you bring as opposed to just, “Well, here’s your annual salary.” It’s a far more meaningful conversation and you have an ability to differentiate yourself as an employer because even though the big companies kind of know that they’re supposed to do it, they’re not that great at doing it generally speaking. I’m sure some of them are great at it, but generally speaking, not that great at it. So you do have an ability to differentiate there.
Brit: And I think college loans are huge. I mean you can’t ignore, and I’m now five years out of school and I still have PTSD from paying off my student loans, I’ll tell you and it’s difficult, and because there are two ways to go about it. You can pay someone enough money so that they can afford to start paying off their college loans or you can really just help them make that investment themselves and I think that’s a really big difference because you’re helping students with their future and you’re helping them really get to the next level.
Alex: And so another way to think of culture is typically larger companies think of student graduates as it’s their privilege to work for me because I’m giving them a chance to get their chops and whatever they’re learning, right? Smaller businesses have the ability to get the best talent coming right out of the gate if they can find a way to say, “I’m going to help repay your student loans and you’re going to engage with me to do that.” Larger companies do have the ability to pull the price lever. So as a small business, if you’re negotiating on price thinking that’s how you’re going to keep your best talent, just know that the very big companies have much more money typically and so you’ve got to grab this cultural piece because the first 10 employees are going to be your most important, and then your next 10 are going to be the hardest because those are the ones you’ll make your biggest mistakes on.
And so being able to get the right people engaged in your business helps set you up for success and then you can become a really big company and tell everybody how you did it. I mean that honestly is you’ve built a culture that’s so good, you can’t make a mistake and that is the opportunity that is available with something like Learn, which I think will just take off. I think in the technology sector and the life science sector, all of these folks that are looking for talent, there’s something now for you to attract the best talent.
Brit: And I want to sort of add to that a little bit in the case that these benefits are really saying something about how you treat employees really from a leadership point of view, and so speaking in that matter, when you look at cost analysis, it’s something else that a lot of business leaders have to deal with and it’s really easy for small businesses to say, “Well benefits are really expensive and am I going to pay my employees or am I going to give them benefits? Or how is that going to work?” And so small businesses don’t always have the same capital as large companies do. So how do you pick and choose? What mindset should you have when you are trying to decide what benefits to offer employees?
Samantha: I mean you start with your values, right? So you start with your company’s values. Who are you as a company and what are you trying to attract? What are the statements you’re trying to make? What do you care about? How do you overtly say to your point earlier, “We are for women. We’re an all-woman company. We’re for women. That’s what we do. That’s going to guide some of your choice points.” So I think you look at mission, vision, values. You always start there in terms of your company and then you look at, all right, what’s the total comp? So stop getting sucked into the conversation about here’s your base because to Alex’s point, a large company is always going to beat you. They have the capacity. It doesn’t mean they will, but they always have the capacity to. Whereas if you start having a very intentional conversation from the very beginning with your prospective employees about the total compensation and treating benefits inside of that as part of the total value that you’re offering and you tie it to your culture.
So you tie each of those benefits pieces into your culture. So when we say we care about your work-life balance. Okay, cool. Every leader I’ve ever worked for has told me that. I’m a lawyer. So you can kind of imagine how that actually plays out in practice, but the way that you show it is by funding the sourdough baking class. That’s something that you can do that is real and tangible and you tie that conversation when you’re actually talking to employees. And if you do that from the first offer, so when you’re offering, you do it from the first offer, I promise you, you will differentiate yourself from the larger companies. You just will, but you have to be intentional about it.
Brit: The sourdough specifically because it takes time to cultivate. You have to watch it. You got to do the whole thing. It’s something you got to take care of.
Alex: I think to sort of add to the conversation about look, I think it’s really important for businesses to understand it is the largest line item typically outside of gross payroll. There are more than enough studies that are done out there that talk about the more you pay towards the benefits and the offering to your employees, the more successful businesses are and there are more than enough out there. You can go look out there and you can see. First of all, I always recommend the Kaiser Family Foundation has information every year about the types of benefits that are being offered so you can look and see, am I even in the right space as I relate to how I offer you and if you’re a customer of ours, we’d be happy to have the same conversations, but it is not the place.
It’s one of those things where on a balance sheet, it just looks like a line item that you cut, but actually the concept of culture and how you engage in HR, that doesn’t sit as a line item in your business and if you’re honestly looking to just save money, it probably makes more sense to just cut your highest wage earners. I’m sure that will make your business successful. That’s how people think about health insurance and you can’t think that way anymore. It is expensive. So make sure you’re making the right decisions and offering something that connects to your mission, vision, values and then get out there in the marketplace and come to us or other companies.
Brit: And the other part of that is really just letting people know what you offer. I think that’s one of the biggest things that employees don’t know is a lot of times they say I don’t know what my benefits are. I don’t know whether we offer that. I was interviewing a lot of small businesses asking them do you have reproductive benefits? And they said, “Yes, we have for 10 years.” And their employees say, “No, we had no idea.” And that’s really that break in communication that happens really often. So how do you tell people, how do you talk about it? How do you open those lines of communication?
Samantha: Yeah, so there’s actually a question about employee engagement, benefits being paced and what else? And I think you’re taking us exactly there in a far more firm or reporter-ish type fashion, which is skillful of you. So it takes you to the different ways that you engage with your employee base and listen to them. So you’re talking to your employees. Who are they? What do they want? How do they think about things? We were talking earlier today about the power of CRGs, affinity groups inside your organization. Now, some small businesses aren’t big enough to have a group, right? Because maybe they’ve got one. Okay, cool. Let’s talk to each of those people and find out what they actually want and then you craft the narrative that maps from how that element of your benefit maps into the thing that your employees say they want, right? And that then becomes part of how you articulate that out to your employee base, but you engage your employees in how to do it and then it becomes repetitive. You can do it again.
Alex: And to add on to that question that was there that’s now gone by the way. I think one of the other ways is the types of companies that are very good at this are nonprofits because it’s about engaging and getting them involved in the mission. Girl Scouts of America is the girls, the girls, the girls. That’s how they think through their culture, but when you think of Chick-fil-A, one of the things they say there is, “Our job today is to sell more chicken.” That’s a cultural active engagement and I can tell you, this is a thing I’ve said for a long time. It is time for small businesses to start thinking about culture by design, not culture by default.
And that culture by design is all of these additional activities. It can be as much as sitting down and spending time to communicate the mission, the vision and the value, why it’s important, why should they be engaged, help them participate in conversations, to understand their job is not just to do this thing, but they’re part of a much bigger piece and think about how you get them actively cross training, cross-functional roles is another way to build that type of discretionary effort, understanding more about how things work. There are lots of ways to get this kind of work done right inside of your business. I know we’re talking about benefits today, but that is a piece of it. That’s because it’s an expense and the opportunity to be successful. There’s lots of ways to get engagement.
Samantha: They’re expensive. Yes, all of those things, but I do think that because they’re expensive, they are a way to say a thing and it’s a way of saying, “Yes, I care very much about you being able to when I’m interviewing with you, right?” Yes, of course I want you to be able to go pick up your child from school every day. That sounds very important to you and of course we will facilitate that. Except on all of the times when we don’t facilitate it, but how do I then back that up for you, right? Do I have some sort of subsidized childcare that’s available for you? How do I help actually achieve that for you?
Brit: Put your benefits where your mouth is, as I would say.
Samantha: I like that.
Brit: Sorry. That’s not the best.
Samantha: No, it’s good.
Alex: And there really is nothing worse than I think 15 years ago, I used to walk around to local restaurants and pizza parlors and see the employee of the month and it’s a January, February, blank, blank. So there’s nothing worse than trying to set up a program like this and doing it for a couple months and stopping. One of the things about the benefits, the reason why we’re talking about it a lot right now is because it is very important to the talent. This is the thing that’s being talked about. Student loans are being talked about right now because of legislation and because of things that are happening. Your employees and your potential talent is thinking about this right now and that’s part of cultural and discretionary efforts because we’re out there thinking about this. This is important to you and I know it and that’s part of building that culture and that discretionary effort.
Brit: Alex, thank you so much for that ending point. And Samantha, thank you so much for joining me as well. Aren’t these two fantastic? They really are wonderful. And thank you so much for filling us in on Enrich Learn. Please go ahead and look up more about it. It’s a fantastic product. And again, I’m Brit Morse. I’m an associate editor at Inc. Magazine. Feel free to grab our latest issue wherever you buy magazines these days, they’re around still. I promise. And thank you so much TriNet, for having me and joining us on stage. And enjoy the rest of the conference.
Samantha: Thank you.
