Many employers are discovering that offering competitive benefits can be a key driver of employee satisfaction and retention. As strategic advisors, business leaders rely on you to provide insights that help their organizations thrive—this includes ensuring their workforce remains engaged and supported. To best serve your clients, it’s essential to familiarize yourself with key benefits topics. By doing so, you’ll be equipped to engage in foundational conversations about employee benefits when they arise, enabling you to offer valuable guidance that aligns with your clients’ needs and helps them retain top talent.
As your partner in accounting and advisory, Gusto is here to support you and present the information you need to succeed, including how benefits can make life easier.
Keep reading to see how you can talk about benefits with clients and help them when they’re ready to explore their options.
The barriers to providing benefits
Advisors who do a great job explaining the perks of providing employee benefits—such as employee retention, more satisfied customers, and a more dedicated staff—still come up against significant barriers. You may explain to your clients the ins and outs of how offering benefits will impact them in positive ways, but if clients don’t think they can afford it, you’ll be wasting your time.
It’s no surprise that many small business owners are hesitant to provide benefits because they worry about the financial strain on their business. As an advisor, helping them figure out whether offering these benefits is a financially viable investment is the first step. Once they understand the affordability, you can then highlight how these benefits will positively impact their business in the long run.
Let’s start with the facts: the average employer spends about $42.40 per hour worked on wages and benefits, with $12.92 of that allocated to benefits, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, 2023). Health insurance alone can cost employers up to $25,572 per year for a family plan.
While the costs of offering benefits can seem significant, it’s important to remember that these expenses can be offset by the savings associated with higher employee retention.
In fact, according to a national study conducted by the Work Institute, the average cost of turnover when an employee leaves is about $18,000—a figure that adds up quickly for businesses. With U.S. employers collectively facing over $900 billion in turnover-related costs annually, investing in employee benefits to boost retention can significantly reduce these expenses and improve your clients’ bottom line.
What’s more, 82% of employees say their benefits give them a greater sense of overall stability, which can directly impact their decision to stay with a company long-term. Employees who feel secure and supported are more likely to remain with their employer, reducing turnover and creating a more stable, experienced workforce.
While premium benefits like health insurance may seem out of reach for some employers, that doesn’t mean they can’t still offer valuable options. They can grow into it when they’re ready and when it’s fiscally responsible for them to do so. Meanwhile, they can consider this concept of low-cost benefits like HSA and FSA.
How Gusto can help surpass cost barriers
As an advisor, part of your role is to educate clients about the options they may not be aware of. Gusto provides a range of solutions tailored to employers who may have limited resources or are currently unable to offer traditional benefits, including the following:
No-cost benefits
That’s right—there is such a thing as no-cost benefits. Employers pay nothing. There are no set-up or administration fees, and there’s no contribution required. With the Gusto Wallet App, employees can manage their paychecks, access spending insights and budgeting tools, and use the paycheck splitter to automatically store savings without your team members needing to think about it.
Low-cost benefits
- Health reimbursement (AKA HRAs like ICHRA and QSEHRA)
- Flexible spending accounts
- Health savings account
These low-cost, high-impact offerings allow for greater flexibility than other plans. Employers pay a modest monthly fee and then choose how much they want to contribute beyond that. When presenting this option, remember that low cost doesn’t mean low value. It’s common for people to assume that when something isn’t expensive, there must be something wrong with it. Your clients will be offering more than just basic benefits by offering this plan—they’re creating a sense of trust and well-being between them and their staff.
Financial security is critical to people’s welfare, yet with so many Americans living paycheck to paycheck, it’s often out of reach. This simple benefit of having access to emergency funds via an early paycheck, coupled with easy ways to build savings, is powerful. People can breathe more easily knowing that they can get support in an emergency, and they will be grateful that their employers understand how important this is.
Premium benefits
- Small group health insurance
- Dental and vision insuance
- Life and disability insurance
- 401k plans
- 529 plans
For the premium packages, Gusto offers everything the top of the market offers and more. With Gusto, clients can access the premium offerings through an all-in-one automated platform that not only gets them high-quality benefits, but also handles deductions, document filings, and recordkeeping—no broker or setup fees. Benefits administration comes free with every Gusto plan.
Why work with Gusto
We get it, benefits can feel like a daunting topic for many accountants, and it’s especially true when it comes to health insurance. With Gusto as your partner, it’s not as scary as you may think. As a licensed benefits broker, Gusto has you covered at every stage in your advisory. You are welcome to connect your clients who are interested in learning more about health insurance with our licensed benefit advisors who can walk them through all the options.
If your Gusto payroll client decides to use Gusto for health insurance, there are benefits to you as well. When both payrolls and benefits are run on Gusto, we automatically handle payroll deductions for medical, dental, and vision insurance. Employee contributions are also taken out automatically for tax-advantaged accounts like HSAs. You don’t have to reconcile payrolls and benefits. It’s just done—and done accurately.
The path to affordable employee benefits
The cost of benefits for most employers has been out of reach historically, and your clients may feel that providing benefits is simply unattainable. As an advisor and partner with Gusto, you can help validate this perception and normalize cost-effective employee benefits. Sharing Gusto’s low-cost and no-cost options may make life easier for your clients.
Gusto’s mission is to create a world that empowers a better life. Our goal is to help you bring more value to your clients and their companies as an advisor.
If you haven’t already, check out our other articles: Why People Advisory Is the ‘New Normal
Becoming a Gusto Partner can make your life easier. Get payroll and HR support for your team and our new advisory revenue stream for your practice through our people advisory platform. As a Gusto partner, you’ll also get tools to help you expand your accounting practice and offer your clients new insights, plus a free payroll subscription for your own accounting firm. Sign up today!
