Understanding the Key Types of Employee Benefits

Employment benefits are a crucial ingredient in any recipe for workforce success. To help attract and retain highly skilled personnel, many employers choose to offer access to a robust and comprehensive array of employee benefits. Besides paying good salaries to your workers, here are some additional benefits that you may wish to provide, in order to enhance your competitiveness as an employer.

Health Benefits

Health benefits form the most crucial part of employee benefits. You may offer health insurance plans as well as non-insurance-related coverage options like health savings accounts. Generally, health benefits that you may offer to your employees include:

• Medical Insurance - You can contribute to this benefit offering that covers medical expenses, including doctor visits, surgeries, drugs, and hospitalization.
• Dental Insurance -This policy covers dental issues like checkups, cleanings, fillings, and root canals.  Many employers include orthodontia benefits as well.
• Vision Insurance - This type of policy addresses your employees’ eyesight health, covering routine eye exams and prescription eyewear.
• Critical Illness Insurance - This benefit may cover your employees for unexpected costs associated with significant health events such as heart attack, stroke or cancer.
• Identity Theft Protection:  This benefit gives employees tools to protect personal information, monitor credit and fix damage that occurs when identity theft happens.
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) -This benefit lets employees put away pre-tax dollars to pay for qualified medical expenses.  Dependent Care Accounts and Transit Accounts are also available.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) - This fund can be paired with a high deductible health plan to pay qualified out of pocket medical expenses.   Accounts can be funded by employers or employees and employees are always 100% vested in accounts.
• Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) - This solution allows employers to supplement health plans and reimburse employees for specific medical expenses on a tax-free basis. Employer plan design options are extremely customizable.

Life Plans

Offering life plans to your employees can enhance your competitiveness in the labor market. Some of the coverage options available may provide accidental death and dismemberment benefits in addition to standard protections. Many employers also offer a supplemental life insurance policies so that employees can select life insurance based on their own needs beyond an employer provided basic life policy.

Disability and Accident Insurance

Disability due to sickness or injury can leave an employee's finances seriously strained.  Think of disability insurance as paycheck protection as it replaces a portion of income when an employee is unable to work. You can usually buy short-term coverage (lasting up to six months) or a long-term disability policy for your employees.

Retirement Plans

You can help your employees build their 401(k) retirement plans by matching their contributions via salary deduction. The mandatory contribution per year is $19,500. However, employees are free to increase their annual 401(k) savings to a maximum of $58,000 or their entire annual pay, whichever is lower. These are some important employee benefits that you can offer as an employer in order to help attract and retain top talent. For help putting together comprehensive insurance coverage for your business, contact our team at Tompkins Insurance Agencies today. We offer a broad array of business insurance policies to suit your unique business needs.