Employee benefits are among the best ways small businesses can attract the highest quality talent possible.

Benefits are routinely one of the most cited reasons for staying at a company. While salary is also a critical factor, benefits can often sway employees more than small changes in their salary. As a result, reviewing your benefit offerings and finding creative ways to offer more to your employees can help attract and retain top talent in your field.

As a professional employer organization, it’s our job to inform you which benefits are most trendy at any given point to help you make the best decisions for what you can offer your employees. Keep reading to discover the best employee benefits for small businesses.

Health Insurance

There are many different health insurance options for small businesses looking for the best employee benefits. That’s part of the problem, though–where do you start?

There are three primary options for health insurance. First, your standard Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) comprises multiple insurance providers. These providers give members health insurance coverage for either a monthly or annual fee. These providers have a network of healthcare providers that contract with the HMO, and members typically receive benefits in that network only. HMOs are great for balancing affordability and coverage for small businesses. These plans minimize healthcare costs, incentivize employees to utilize preventative care services and standardize healthcare costs.

Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs) are health plans that contract with individual medical service providers to offer a specific list of coverage options. These are typically partnered with particular doctors and hospitals. With this network, members get extra flexibility to seek care outside of their network, allowing them to utilize benefits while getting the coverage they need.

Traditional healthcare plans usually require members to pay for their services upfront and then submit the bill to their carrier for reimbursement. While this does place more risk on the insurance carrier, it does mean medical expenses are a little more predictable. These plans usually utilize a deductible that needs to be met, and healthcare providers often submit costs to the insurance providers themselves.

If you’re a small business, though, you have some more flexibility in addition to the group health insurance options. You can also access individual health plans, where you self-insure your employees and then make payments through payroll deductions. While this may sound unnecessarily risky, a lot of technology and data are available to predict and account for healthcare costs accurately. While not for every business, small businesses looking for the best healthcare benefits might like the lower costs with more specific coverage for their employees.

Retirement Options

A 401k is one of the best employee benefits for small businesses and is often treated as a standard for benefit offerings. It’s essential to think about retirement, and a 401k gives employees a little extra incentive to pay into a retirement plan through tax benefits. Employers can also choose to match part of that contribution. It’s great for the economy, retirement, and retaining and attracting quality talent.

The traditional 401k is eligible for its tax benefits because it’s a “defined contribution” plan. This is one of the two types of retirement plans eligible for tax benefits. A defined-contribution plan essentially tracks the investments made into an account and how they perform over time. After retirement, employees are then granted the account balance.

A pension plan is the other type of retirement plan eligible for tax benefits. Pensions are paid before guaranteeing payments from retirement through end-of-life. The details vary depending on the pension plan itself, but instead of retiring with a lump sum that you can then pull from, a pension plan acts essentially as a retirement salary, where you continue to receive payments through your retirement and don’t have to manage the sum on your own.

Paid Time Off

Paid time off (PTO) is one of the most important tools you have to prevent employee burnout.

It’s no secret that PTO helps employees establish a healthy work-life balance, pursue activities or time with family without stressing about time off, and feel appreciated by their company. In fact, PTO is one of the best employee benefits for small businesses because it directly impacts employees’ perception of working for a business. The key is to clearly explain PTO policies to employees and ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to using it.

While you can just add a flat number of PTO days to your company policy, you could also consider looking into other PTO benefits that are more structured in the work calendar. Holidays are a great way to spread out PTO while giving your employees “free” days in their calendar without needing to think about work or their paycheck. Many companies also use “floating” vacation days, where they allocate PTO on specific days but allow their employees to move them to other holidays they might want to celebrate.

There are a lot of ways to implement PTO policies, but what’s most important for small businesses to consider is what their employees prefer. Polling your existing employees on their preferred policies is a great way to build trust and rapport with your workforce.

Flexible Work Arrangements

One of the best ways for small businesses to offer additional benefits to their employees without impacting their bottom line is through non-monetary benefits that improve the employee work experience.

Flexible work arrangements have been a hot topic since the Covid pandemic started. While fully remote work only works for some businesses, you can get very creative with work flexibility if your employees and potential talent are looking for it.Most small businesses prefer a specific type of work arrangement, but compromising could dramatically benefit the company if it’s what employees want.

That could still mean a fully remote or remote-optional staff, but hybrid work environments are great for balancing the benefits of in-person collaboration with your employees’ personal preferences. There are also lots of ways businesses that need everyone in office can be more flexible. For example, appointment policies that allow your employees to schedule needed appointments without taking time off or allowing parents to leave early to pick children up from school. Work flexibility doesn’t need to mean working outside the office, it’s about creating an arrangement that supports healthy work-life balance.

At the end of the day, a happy employee is about 13% more productive on average.

Wellness Programs

Wellness programs are beginning to become more of an expectation in today’s workplace.

While they aren’t standard in every industry, mental health has dramatic impacts on employee productivity, and a few simple steps could help create a healthy and positive work environment while providing your employees with extra resources when they need them. In addition to the resources themselves, putting your employees’ health first can also encourage your employees to ask for help when they need it instead of feeling like they’re on their own.

Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) are a primary wellness benefit. These programs are specifically geared towards employees who are struggling with personal difficulties, including financial planning and stress, or their friends and family. All of these things impact an employee’s work, and that stress can quickly add up and lead to additional work stress, causing a cycle that continues to negatively impact your employees.

You can also build in other wellness benefits that aren’t a direct expense to your business. Programs like weekly yoga or meditation sessions help build in breaks and stillness for your employees, which can dramatically impact productivity.

If you’re looking for the best employee benefits for small businesses, many employees look to their employers to provide these resources rather than needing to coordinate and seek them out on their own. You don’t always know when hardship will come, but having those systems in place for when your employees need them is a really important assurance.

Learning and Development

Professional development is one of the most important benefits that can directly impact a company’s bottom line.

Putting a little energy and resources into offering professional development opportunities to your employees can go a long way. There are two ways you can improve your offerings and expertise internally. You can either hire new talent or train your current talent. While hiring talent may seem like the obvious answer, hiring is costly, and small businesses might be better off putting their resources into improving the skills of their current employees before looking to hire. Development opportunities, training, or additional certifications are all skills that will enhance your employees’ skills are all great ways to improve your processes, products, and services.

Another crucial factor to consider is offering learning and development opportunities signals to your current and future employees that you want them to grow in their positions. This opens up opportunities for advancement and personal growth that positively impact your business and employees.If you don’t already offer professional development resources to your employees, consider researching how they benefit your company, as they are one of the best employee benefits for small businesses.

Canal HR Offers the Best Employee Benefits for Small Businesses

If you are looking to retain and attract new employees, then routinely evaluating your benefits is a great way to build trust with your employees. As a PEO, our company specializes in equipping your business with the most affordable benefit options:

Canal HR can help keep your employees happy, but we can also help keep you happy. By saving you time and giving you more affordable benefit rates, we can help you focus more on running your business and less on filling out paperwork. To learn more about us and our services, we encourage you to contact us today. We want to help you free up some time in your calendar.