Maximize Your Benefits: Leveraging a PEO for Greater Buying Power

In an era of scarce talent and high turnover, it pays to invest in a high-caliber HR experience.

Today's jobseekers are looking for more than just a paycheck. To be truly competitive, modern employers must be able to quickly and effectively respond to the needs of their workforce and project a genuine concern for the wellbeing of employees. The most straightforward way to meet these expectations is improving HR infrastructure and investing in benefits and wellness programs that make your organization stand out from the pack.

For business leaders, this is no easy task. Harmonizing essential employee services and streamlining human resource operations can alleviate significant pressure from your business and offer a better experience for your people. This is where a Professional Employment Organization (PEO) emerges as a strategic partner to small and medium-sized businesses.

What Is A PEO?

A Professional Employment Organization (PEO) partners with a business to provide its employees with professional services like health insurance and benefits, human resource consulting, and financial planning services. Working with a PEO allows a business to partner with one single team to fulfill all their workforce needs.

When a business decides to partner with a PEO, the PEO assumes the position of a co-employer for the organization’s workforce. In this unique partnership, both the PEO and the business take on the role of official employer for the employee. The business retains control over the employee’s responsibilities and work, while the PEO manages administrative duties like payroll and benefits enrollment.

The collaborative nature of partnering with a PEO frees up leaders to focus on growing their business while ensuring that the employee services are being met and upheld to high standards.

Unlock the Power of Partnership: PEO Advantages

If you’ve never worked with a PEO before, you may ask yourself what advantages there are to this kind of partnership. Working with one PEO firm to deliver all your workforce needs can help your business in the following three ways:

1. Providing the best possible health and financial benefits to your employees:

By partnering with a PEO, you gain access to various health, wellness, and financial benefit programs that your employees value. This will help your employees feel cared for and increase their happiness and commitment at work. Getting your benefits right is a critical retention differentiator between you and competing businesses in the war for talent.

2. Helping expand your talent pool:

During the pandemic, many organizations opened up their hiring to new locations across the country and even globally. This means that businesses are now tasked with understanding local, and global policies as they relate to employee benefits and compliance regulations. Working with a PEO takes this off a business’ plate and ensures no matter where the employer operates, they remain compliant. Working with a PEO also helps you expand your talent pool by providing HR processes and infrastructure that you need to bring on and retain new employees.

3. One vendor, many services:

Enjoy the benefits of working with one single vendor to service many of your needs. You can streamline your vendor relationship management by relying on one single vendor and minimize time spent seeking out vendors and going through their procurement process. You’ll enjoy the added benefit of having one unified strategy across all your benefits and resources. Develop a holistic strategy that aligns with your culture, seamlessly integrates with your other offerings and addresses the needs of your workforce to foster healthier and happier employees.

Maximizing Your Employee Benefits

As we mentioned earlier, offering strong benefits to your employees will increase their personal wellness and their commitment to your organization. It will also help give you a competitive edge when candidates are evaluating taking a job with your organization.

So, how can you leverage your PEO to get the most out of your employee benefits? One of the best advantages that PEOs can offer is their economies of scale. When a PEO is able to pool all their clients, they build collective buying power with benefits providers. This gives them negotiation power which results in their ability to offer access to high-quality services and benefits at more affordable prices.

Smaller companies are often not able to compete with the benefits that larger organizations are able to offer their employees. Working with a PEO brings customers together to achieve volume that gets them a better deal when working with larger providers.

Thus, working with a PEO gives you access to the best possible plans and keeps your packages competitive when you’re a small to medium-sized company.

Exploring PEO partnerships empowers businesses of all sizes to foster growth and innovation while enhancing employee wellbeing.

Ready to discover how a PEO strategy would help your organization thrive? Connect with a OneDigital Resourcing Edge consultant to learn more.