I’ve been doing a lot of hiring recently, and it reminded me a policy that we came up with in the early days of the Company when we hired our first employees. When it comes to health benefits, we pay 100% of the employees health plan. This means that if you work for us, the company pays 100% of the costs of your health insurance, your dental insurance, your workers comp, and your basic life insurance.
From my experience, this is fairly unusual. For all of the companies where I’ve ever worked, the company would pay anywhere from 50-80% of the health care costs. It’s a fairly standard practice. So why do we pay 100%?
As a CEO of a small Company, I believe that it’s the company’s responsibility to care for the entire well-being of the employees. It’s not enough to care for people between the hours of 9-6. I believe that we have a responsibility to protect and care for our most valuable assets. The health care costs of employees is a cost that I think the company should bear.
So what’s the catch? How do we afford to pay for 100% of the employee benefits? It’s pretty simple. Unlike other organizations which pay for 50-80% of your TOTAL benefits package, we only pay for the employee. This means that if you have a spouse, and choose the Employee + Spouse plan, we only pay for the Employee’s portion. The Employee is responsible for paying the difference. If the employee has children, and needs the Employee + Family plan, the employee is responsible for paying the family portion. We cover 100% of the employee.
The co-founder of the Company and I made this decision a while ago (hat tip: Sean Conta) because we think it sends a clear message to our employees: you are very important to us, and we want you to be taken care of completely. While we care about your immediate family and understand the impact they can have on your well-being, we believe your personal decisions have nothing to do with your contribution as an employee. We provide you an easy and cost-effective way to cover health benefits of anyone that you choose.
We don’t care if you want to cover your spouse, domestic partner, or same-sex partner under our health care plan. As long as you pay the difference in cost, you can cover your pet armadillo (well, ok.. maybe not). Also, we don’t care how many children are in your family. As long as you pay the difference in cost, you can cover all twenty of your offspring. Again, we don’t care about your personal decisions. It’s none of our business, and we’re not going to pay the costs associated with your personal decisions.
This policy has made recruiting simpler. As a small Company, this makes the cost of each employee’s benefits equal. We don’t shy away from more established candidates who have multiple children, and we’re not influenced by whether your spouse already has a health plan. Our policy underlines that we don’t care if you’re single, married, divorced, or gay. When we make a hiring decision, it’s with the expectation that we’ll be paying for 100% of the costs for the employee’s benefits.
It’s pretty expensive to cover 100% of the cost of employee benefits. For each full-time employee, it’s more than one thousand dollars per month (when you include all benefits, service fees, and processing fees). So it’s a significant part of the overall compensation for an employee. Often, employees don’t realize how much of their compensation is the health plan, and it’s something that we should probably emphasize more often.
The policy of paying 100% of employee benefits has worked well for us, and potential employees seem to like the clarity that our policy provides. My hope is that even as health care costs continue to rise, we’ll be able to continue to offer this benefit.
Employees are your most important asset, right? So show them you mean it by covering 100% of the cost of employee benefits.
Looking for exciting career opportunities in greater Boston? Check out the current job openings at Sincere: https://www.sincere.com/careers
May 16, 2011
hiring, startup 
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