Advantages of a PEO From a User's Perspective

Please note that these sessions are for educational purposes only. TriNet provides HR guidance and best practices. TriNet does not provide legal, tax or accounting advice. The materials in these sessions and the products, advice and opinions expressed in these sessions are solely those prepared by the presenter and not necessarily those of TriNet.

Katrina Faessel:
We are very excited for you to hear from some of our current TriNet PEO customers. Our customers will be sharing first-hand accounts of their PEO experience and why it works for them. Time permitting, they'll be able to take a few of your questions. Please help me welcome to the virtual stage Erin McGinty, Divisional Vice President, Health and Welfare Services, TriNet, Kimberly Oglesby, Global HR Partner, Vizrt, and Gretchen Crist, Chief People and Culture Officer, Pet Honesty.

Erin McGinty:
Hi there. Hello. All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to the PEO Edge. My name is Erin McGinty and I'm very excited to introduce our panelists today. We're going to teach everyone today what it's like to work with a PEO. So Kim, why don't we start with you? If you could introduce yourself to the audience. Tell us a little bit about you.

Kim Oglesby:
Sure. My name is Kim Oglesby. I'm in Texas, used to live in Illinois. We've been with TriNet, it'll be going on two years in June. Have really enjoyed it. I've been in HR pretty much my whole career. I work for a company called Vizrt. It's a smaller company. And prior to that, I was with a large insurance company and we had in-house payroll, we had in-house centers of excellence, benefits, all of that stuff. And so I never really needed to engage a PEO. So this was very new to me when I came to Vizrt in 2021. So, but just enjoying it.

Erin:
Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Kim, how about you or Gretchen or Kim? Sorry. Gosh, this is called live TV. It's all good.

Gretchen Crist:
It's all good.

Erin:
Gretchen, let's hear from you.

Gretchen:
Yeah, my story is actually very similar to Kim's. So, today I'm head of HR for an early life cycle pet company called Pet Honesty. We make pet supplements for dogs and cats, vitamins, all kinds of great things. And as I said, we're very early life cycle. We've about 50 employees. But prior to Pet Honesty, I've worked for big global companies, like Hankel. I ran their North America region, had 100 people in HR and, like him, had somebody doing payrolls, somebody doing benefits, all kinds of centers of excellence But I did have one role earlier in my career, which was a startup.

It was actually an Enron spinoff company for anyone who is familiar with the Enron story. And I did use a PEO at that time. This was, you know, early 2000s when PEOs were not that well developed. But that was my first opportunity and in coming to Pet Honesty, of course, I knew it was going to be the right choice for us. So, thank you. I really appreciate being invited to share the good experience I've had with TriNet.

Erin:
Thank you. Thank you. Glad to have both of you here. And as we know, a PEO can be a game changer for businesses when they're looking to streamline their HR operations, mitigate compliance risk and just improve their overall workforce management. But it can be a scary change. So I want to thank you both for being here while we talk through what it is like to work with a PEO. Sorry for the name issues. I don't know. I think my screen did something backwards there. We're going to new technology, which is always fun too.

Right. So we're going to do it together. So Gretchen, let's start with you. How has partnering with the PEO positively impacted your business operations and your overall efficiency?

Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, very kind of simply said, we have better benefits at a lower cost and a lot more choices for our employees in terms of benefits. It's just an amazing difference from what we had when I first arrived at the company where we were working directly with a broker. And I would also say that I could never do the strategic level, sort of HR business partnership work if I had to worry about, you know, what payroll law changed in the state of New York. I mean, there just would be no way and we'd have to hire probably a team of four to five HR people, which in a small company, is not affordable.

Erin:
Right. It's at a significant cost for sure. Yeah. Kim, how about you?

Kim:
Yeah, I can piggyback off of what Gretchen mentioned about this, the strategic part of it. So, I would not be able to do that part of my job if I had to manage everything. And it's great because we have a very small HR department here in the Americas.

There's just two of us, and so we do all of the recruiting, you know, it's pretty much very generalist from nuts to bolts type of thing and having the PEO to be able to lean on for workers’ comp, for all of the insurance needs, all the payroll needs, the professional liability insurance is great. Unfortunately, we've actually had to use it a couple of times, but it's been a very good benefit for us to have that. And the fact that employees can contact the chat, you know, basically 24 by 7 is so helpful because you know, I'm not on 24 by 7.

Erin:
Nor do you want to be.

Kim:
Nor do I want to be, it's really great. And the folks that monitor that are great with creating cases, I mean, and their follow up is really good too. So it's a game changer for us. Really. Yeah.

Gretchen:
I mean, I would add that the 24/7 chat bot feature is fantastic. I mean, I'm using it myself all the time, you know, like eight, nine o'clock at night. I'm like, I wonder about this or that. It has really been helpful.

Erin:
Good.

Gretchen:
Incredibly helpful.

Erin:
Well, and it's not just for your employees, right? You both have needs as well.

Kim:
Yes, we do.

Erin:
And when you do have a small HR team, even if it is the middle of the night when you don't want to work, if it's in your normal work day, getting virtual interruptions or walk up interruptions while good people have good intention still will take away from the work that you need to do, so you can be more strategic and not answer direct deposit questions, not that they're not important, but it's nice that you have support, you know, as an example for things like that.

So, Kim, in what ways has the PEO helped you navigate the complex HR? You know, complex HR, it has so many compliance requirements. You know, Gretchen mentioned New York, every state law is different. So I'm just curious. When you think about HR compliance, how has the PEO helped you?

Kim:
Yeah, we have our offices, we have in Atlanta, New York, and then in Texas. And then we have a lot of remote employees in different parts of the United States, California, Minnesota, Florida, Ohio, Nebraska, Kansas, I mean, all over, right. Having to be able to memorize all of that stuff is just, would be impossible. The other piece that I like is that I can push employees to the website so that they can get answers themselves.

You know, if I'm not available it's great to put on my 'out of office', you know, "If you have questions about payroll or something, contact TriNet." And you know, just the whole compliance piece of it is that I understand that, you know, TriNet's going to give me a heads up when something changes.

So I know recently some of the states changed their minimum wage laws, they've increased them. Oh my gosh, the California pay data, whole thing, the EEO-1 reporting, all of that, because we get so really good workforce analytics reports and how to do that. I mean, they come along with you and they help you through it, which is great. So I always know that I have a resource to reach out to, so.

Erin:
That's good. That's good. Yeah, keeping up with each state law and then each topic, right from payroll. You name it. You name it. Right. And so, and Gretchen you talked about you're around the 50-employee mark, you said.

Gretchen:
Yeah.

Erin:
You're at that super, like that, you're just like next level. When you hit 10 is a big number, 50 is a big number. How about you? How has working with the PEO helped you?

Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, it has, as Kim said, I mean, half of our workforce is remote, half is in Austin, Texas. A real example of something that happened. We have a few employees in the state of New York and I believe it was last year, they changed the minimum salary requirement. Honestly, I would have never have known that. It would have taken me some time to have figured that out. And we had an employee who was below that limit. And, you know, immediately TriNet reached out, told me who the employee was and we fixed it immediately. Labor posters, the posters that amazingly we are still required to keep hanging in the lunchroom.

Erin:
I have mine in my kitchen.

Gretchen:
At your office, if you're right, and so those posters, I mean, they're changing all the time. You get an email from TriNet, "Here's your posters, print them, post them in your office."

Erin:
Right.

Gretchen:
Employee relations. I mean, I'm an HR person of one. I've always said it's hard to do HR alone. Like, you really need like someone to test your judgment on employee relations issues. So I've done that a couple of times. I've reached out to the employee relations team, TriNet to say, "Okay, this is the situation. This is how I'm thinking about dealing with it. What do you think?" And very helpful. Very helpful.

Erin:
Good. Yeah. HR, you live in the gray, right?

Gretchen:
Yeah. Yes.

Erin:
It's funny you say that cause I always say I would never want to. I have an HR background. I would never want to be a one-person HR show is how I always say it because you do want to have that person to run something by and just check yourself. You want to do the right thing for both sides of whatever's going on cause HR usually involves different scenarios, right? So, it's wonderful to hear that you have that opportunity. Good. While we're with you, Gretchen, let's talk about how some specific examples of how your company has benefited from the employee benefits. A lot of conversation when it comes to PEO is around employee benefits and perks and having those bigger company benefits, but I'd like to hear it more from your perspective than mine since I work here.

Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. So prior to TriNet, as I said earlier, we were procuring our benefits through a broker and we had the standard medical dental vision through UnitedHealthcare and there was no difference in plan designs. It was like, here it is. And the negative was because we're such a small employer, they put you in a pool with a bunch of other small employers, and if they have claims and risk, you end up paying for that. And while that may be somewhat true with TriNet, I've already had an experience with a renewal with TriNet.

And your renewals, your actual claims experience for your population are factored into your renewals. So, if you're doing things to help your employees become better consumers of health care and incenting people to say, sign up for the high deductible plan, or give them a reward for not putting their family on your coverage. All of these kinds of things are all possible with the TriNet framework and the volume of different plan designs are amazing. There's something for everyone. And then we have life insurance now for employees. Never had that before. And we have all these voluntary benefits. We're a pet company. We can offer our employees pet insurance, right?

Erin:
We probably should, right?

Gretchen:
So, it's just amazing. We could never have offered all of these options to our employees if we weren't with a PEO.

Erin:
Yeah. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Everyone loves the pet insurance and the disability, all those types of plans too, obviously, but the people love their pets. So that's awesome. How about you, Kim, what's your experience been with the benefits?

Kim:
Oh, gosh. So we were with another PEO. They'll be nameless. When we transitioned in 2022 and one of the complaints that we got from the employees is there weren't enough options for medical. Dental and vision were okay. And we had life insurance and AD&D and all of the voluntary benefits, but they really wanted more options. Cause we have about 125 people in the United States, and then we also have four people in Canada. So I have a Canadian segment that's on their own platform.

It's like the same TriNet platform, but it's a little bit different. But it was those benefits that we wanted to offer to employees so they had the more options. We've got the high deductible plans. There's the EPOs, the PPOs. I mean, you name it through Anthem which was Empire. But the funny thing now is now that they're saying, "Well, we have too many options," which kind of cracks me up because it's like, "Well, wait a minute, two years ago, you didn't have enough. And now you're telling me you have too many."

Erin:
You can't make everyone happy.

Kim:
As much as we try. But I have to tell you the conversion from prior PEO to TriNet was pretty much seamless just because there was a specific project team that we worked with, specific people and, oh, shoot, what am I trying to say? The process that we went through and the preparation, right? Mapping everything and all of that stuff. I mean, they basically, everybody just kind of held our hand through it and we did it in a really quick amount of time because I believe, we signed the contract in January and we moved in April.

Erin:
Oh, wow. Okay.

Kim:
Yeah. Or no, it was June. Sorry. It was June, but still that was a pretty short time for us to do that. And then with the preparation, with all the communications that we got from TriNet, you know, about notifying employees, "Okay, this is the changes that we're going to make, these are the things that you could expect." And those types of things was really beneficial for us, so.

Erin:
Yeah, that's good. And I think too, when you think about the implementation, the onboarding experience, I mean, you're putting a lot of trust into another company to help make sure, because your employees trust you, right. So if you have a smooth onboarding, it makes a very big difference in helping them understand why you're moving to work with this company because who's TriNet. I work for this company. This doesn't make sense. You know, you need a lot of support and explaining what this is and where your paycheck comes from now. And so that's good to hear.

Kim:
Yeah, you know, and one of the reasons that we moved was because of the customer service that we weren't getting with the previous PEO. And then also we saved a bunch of money too.

Erin:
Well, that's good.

Kim:
Making a switch.

Erin:
That helps.

Kim:
That definitely helped.

Erin:
Wonderful. So, Gretchen, how about your, let's talk about your business objectives and your strategic initiatives. You know, you'd mentioned you're one person in HR. How has working with a PEO helped you focus more on what you want to accomplish as a business?

Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, it's allowed me to not be in the land of administration, you know, 10 hours a day. I mean, now I can put more of my focus on building talent capability in the organization. We've got a succession planning program that I've put together. We're starting actually to put some learning and development programs in place. And TriNet, I'm partnering with TriNet to do that. Because there's lots of great offerings on the TriNet platform. I mean, it's enabled me to make those value-add contributions CEOs desire from their HR person, but a lot of times it's really hard to deliver on it because if you can't pay people, right, forget it, nobody wants to talk to you.

If their paycheck's wrong, they don't think you can do anything else. So it just is such a solution for small to midsize companies. You know, there is a monthly fee that you pay for all the services, but honestly, I think it's reasonable given all of the services and TriNet continues to add other services and improvements to the platform. They're investing. So I mean, it's been a total game changer in terms of my ability to do my job at a higher level. And you know, I'm getting all this credit for all these great benefits we have.

Erin:
As you should.

Gretchen:
And it isn't a bad thing either.

Erin:
No, that doesn't hurt.

Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm gonna say this, the kids in the office they call me, you know, banging benefits. That's probably inappropriate. That's like how much people just love our benefits and how different they are than when I joined and made this choice to go to TriNet.

Erin:
Well, even generationally, benefits are different for everyone. You know, when you're talking about the kids, you know, it's going to depend on what point in your life cycle you're in and what matters to you. And sometimes I don't know that people know the benefits matter as much as they do until they need them. One of the things we say, I work in the health and welfare team. One of the things we talk about is how benefits are personal, right? And that having that assurance, not only that they have it, but you, I think we, when we work in these fields and we work so closely with the people, we care about them and we want them to have benefits that you know are going to keep them safe no matter what happens. Yeah. So, I love that. I love that you have a nickname. That's wonderful. And take all the credit. Thank you. Take all the credit.

Kim, how about you? Like when we talk about business objectives and your strategy, how does working with a PEO help you focus on what really matters to you?

Kim:
Well, I think similar to Gretchen, it just takes away kind of that day-to-day administration because I know it's a very user-friendly sites and employees can get answers to their questions without, you know, actually having to come to me. I think that's great. Sometimes, you know, if I just do like a screenshot and say, "Hey, this is where you go get it."

Right. And then they'll remember it next time. So that's one of the things I think, prior to me being with the organization, they relied heavily on the HR people, giving them all of the answers and what we've had to do is self-educate them and let them know that this is a self-service type of situation that you're in. And if you want the answer, there are multiple ways that you can get that, which helps. And so if I'm not available then you can do that. But it allows me to think about and talk about succession planning and performance appraisals and learning and development. And are we going to be doing banding this year and pay ranges and stuff?

So I can focus on the big picture versus the small stuff. We recently just went through open enrollment and sometimes that's like herding cats, just to get everybody to make sure they go in and enroll. But the reports that I can get, and I can tell who's looked at something, or if they've actually made a selection and stuff, is so helpful. Because I don't have to just do a blanket kind of communication. I can say, "Ah, I know you haven't done this yet, so you need to go in and do it," right? Because it goes back to your caring about the people. Because I don't want anybody to not get the benefits that they wanted, right? And it's just so refreshing to know that all of that information is there for them.

Erin:
And we all have different skill sets, right? So for someone to imagine that people who do not work in benefits understand the compliance and there's laws around when you can enroll in benefits and when you can't, what's offered to you. And so you don't want to micromanage everyone, but at the same time, if you care, and I think most people genuinely care about people, you can get a report and say, "Okay, there's five people that haven't done this and they do not know what is about to, you know, happen if they don't figure this out." Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I work in benefits and I'm like, "Ah, open enrollment," because it is something else to do. Right. But the easier you can make it on your people, the better. That's great. Yeah. While I have you, Kim, let's talk about cost savings and administration as a result of working with a PEO.

Kim:
Yeah, I think, from the cost savings perspective, a lot of it is my time, of course. I think it saves on my time. The structure, the way TriNet has it is really good. I love the benefit strategy. When you go into open enrollment, where you can actually go in and play around with the different strategies, you know, make changes to what the company is going to contribute, whether that's, you know, 85%, 75% or whatever.

Erin:
Sure.

Kim:
And you can actually see then how that impacts the employee on their premiums. And when we went through the open enrollment this past time, I did like several different comparisons and I was able to take that to our leadership team who is in Norway.

So I work with a lot of folks that are outside of the United States and they make approvals on these things. And so I was able to really narrow it down to say, okay, if we make this change, this is the impact to the employee. And this is the kind of response that you're going to get from the employee if you make this change. And so that was very helpful for them to see how it would impact the employee and not necessarily just the company's bottom line.

Erin:
Right.

Kim:
And so that's been really helpful. I like that—the whole benefit strategy piece of it because it takes a lot of the manual work out of the process.

Erin:
It really does. Yeah, we don't have to work in Excel spreadsheets.

Kim:
Oh, yeah. Thank goodness. Yeah.

Erin:
What's interesting too, though, with the leaders being in Norway, and then part of your role is also explaining American benefits.

Kim:
Yes.

Erin:
Very different, right? And so being able to have those visuals and help others understand why it's so much more expensive in the United States compared to other countries is so important.

Kim:
Yeah, because they have some of the socialism with it, the government is pretty much, you know, pays for everything, right? So they don't have those, they don't necessarily have those total comp costs, right? They don't have that benefit costs and all of that. And so, yeah, they do look at it very differently when we start coming at them with, okay, this is what it's going to cost for us.

Erin:
And back to being a two-person team, right?

Kim:
Yeah, you need all the help you can get. That's wonderful.

Erin:
Yeah. Gretchen, let's turn it to you. How have you saved with administrative costs?

Gretchen:
Yeah, so in making the initial switch to TriNet, we saved $100,000 in benefit costs and we added five or six benefits that we didn't have before. So, I mean, it just was a complete no brainer. The other big plus on the administration side is reduction in management of vendors. I mean, prior to TriNet, I was probably managing five or six different vendors, you know, a vendor for the, you know, applicant tracking system, a vendor for medical, a vendor for workers’ comp and all of that has gone away.

And that's a lot of work—managing all these different vendors and keeping everyone on track and holding everybody accountable. Now, it's completely like, not even in my head space. I know that TriNet's doing it and the other pluses, I don't have to create all these plan design documents.

Erin:
Right.

Gretchen:
And I mean, that's a ton of work and very technical work. So, I mean, it's just amazing what TriNet, the relief it brings you from everything administrative to also strategic. It's really both in my view.

Erin:
Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. Right. And even when you talk about multiple vendors, that's just multiple meetings on top of it. It's not just different topics that you're segmenting out. You're meeting with each one of those vendors and while you're relationship building, that's nice. But at the same time, every time you add another meeting to your calendar, and I don't know about you two, but there's a lot of meetings in a day, you're taking away from the value-add that you may be able to do otherwise.

Kim:
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Erin:
Love to hear that.

Kim:
And it's nice just to have, you know, one contact for payroll, one contact for HR, another contact for this.

Erin:
With backups though, because everybody gets to take the day off.

Kim:
I know they do. And they put who their backup is in the office, which is awesome. I was like, yeah, okay. So this person is going to cover for me for these hours per day, and this person's going to cover me for these hours per day.

Erin:
Yeah.

Kim:
That's actually pretty cool.

Erin:
Well, what a great way to end on taking the day off. So I hope you two get a day off soon. Really do appreciate Kim and Gretchen, your time today. Wonderful to hear from you. I'm sure we've helped a lot of people understand what it's like to work with a PEO. So thank you. Thanks for being customers.