Nurture and Engage | Connect and Deliver | Thrive and Grow
Warmth, loyalty, and longevity are certainly three ideal qualities of the relationships PEOs would like to have with all of their clients. The complicated nature of PEO/client relationships requires the PEO to provide the proper care and feeding for each and every client. The good news is that a holistic strategy to client care can allow PEOs to provide the energy, nourishment, and vibrancy their clients need, beginning with the sales process and leading to a fulfilling long-term relationship for both client and PEO. This ongoing client nurturing and engagement makes the ground fertile for client retention.
My last article in PEO Insider® discussed a powerful way to explain what PEOs are and how they help clients. You may recall the main value proposition: “We solve problems in the areas of human resources, workers’ compensation, risk management, employee benefits, and payroll. Our goal is to help you increase profitability, maximize employee productivity, reduce time spent doing transactional human resources activities, reduce employment-related liability, and ultimately lower labor costs.”
One of the many valuable services PEOs provide to their clients is risk management, much of which entails obtaining and administering the workers’ compensation policy on behalf of clients. Because in most cases, the workers’ compensation policy is in the name of the PEO, the PEO must achieve positive results to ensure continuity of coverage and avoidance of untenable premium increases. PEOs also have a vested interest in ensuring that clients’ operations are coded properly for premium purposes. Many PEOs emphasize their risk management expertise to their clients at the point of sale.
The client service agreement (CSA) is a PEO’s fresh start at client relations. It is the time to re-examine past failures—the lost client, the misunderstandings along the way, and the wasted retention efforts—and an opportunity to intelligently begin again. An artfully drafted (and negotiated) CSA can go a long way toward establishing a rich and long-lasting client relationship.
Have you ever been in a car speeding down a dark, unknown country road late at night, holding on for dear life, and just hoping the driver knew what was ahead? That is how some of us and most PEO clients feel about the healthcare revolution underway in the United States today. Many thought the journey would end early at some way station along the road (the Supreme Court or the national election), but it didn’t, and here we are, moving even faster on a twisting road that has few guideposts and no indication of what is ahead. Sort of scary!
Access to healthcare coverage is one of the major benefits PEOs offer their clients. In offering such coverage, PEOs frequently find themselves dealing with or assisting their clients in dealing with the federal and state level requirements for offering healthcare continuation coverage. These complex rules can create confusing situations when PEOs are transferring client employers either into or out of the PEO relationship.
As NAPEO’s new vice president of state government affairs, I want to take the opportunity to introduce myself to NAPEO’s membership in this column.
If anything positive can be said about job creation among small firms in February, it’s that it didn’t decline, according to National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Chief Economist William C. Dunkelberg, commenting on February 2013 job numbers reported in the NFIB’s monthly economic survey.
After reading an article about staff leasing in Inc. Magazine in 1983 (or was it 1984?), Tim Doherty was curious about it. The article described the concept and talked about a staff leasing company in California. This company worked with medical clients.
As I write this, there is a debate among our membership in several states over unemployment insurance. Debate is good. It is a sign of a vibrant, healthy association and I welcome it. Remember, I came here from the National Association of Manufacturers, where at any given time we were having debates among our 14,000 members on a wide range of topics. It was good—it made us stronger.
Q. Did the Department of Labor (DOL) change the FMLA requirements? A. The DOL has changed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) regulations and requirements several times since its initial passage.
Your organization has goals—purposes or desired outcomes it strives to attain. Undoubtedly, one of these goals is success through growth. Naturally, growth is also a goal we should pursue as an industry. The question is: What must we do to achieve this goal?
This month marks the third anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) becoming law. And there’s still a lot businesses don’t know about the health reform law.
In today’s atmosphere of strict government enforcement initiatives, compliance is more than ever before a selling point for PEOs. It sounds good. It seems like something small businesses would be interested in because, really, they don’t know what they don’t know.
In an effort to showcase the expertise of NAPEO’s members and position the PEO industry as an expert resource on a broad range of HR, benefits, and healthcare issues, NAPEO is launching its Emerging Issues series of papers to examine and analyze developing or evolving issues
When a session of Congress ends, it takes with it the legislation that was introduced but not passed. Such was the fate of the Small Business Efficiency Act (SBEA), which was not passed during the previous session of Congress.