Legacy Digest

Having Trouble Hiring or Retaining Employees? Try This.

If you’re like many business owners out there, you know that the struggle to hire and retain talent is all too real. Finding reliable employees who will show up every day with a smile on their face and bring a positive impact to your company is a significant challenge. With all the time you spend hiring and training new employees, you can easily lose focus on running the business and making it as successful as it should be. As insurance agents with significant experience in employee benefits, we have seen a serious expansion in the amount and types of benefits that employers offer employees to try to bring them in and keep them with the company. If you think you’ve tried everything, this article will give you some information on one option you may not have considered.

What Most Companies Do Now

Many companies have some amount of employee benefits they offer their employees through a traditional employee benefits broker or insurance agent. These standard benefits include things like access to group health insurance plans, and may also expand to include things like long and/or short term disability coverage options. You may also see term life policies that are kept in place so long as the employee remains with the company. Often times the company will actually end up paying for these coverages, as the cost of all of the benefits begins to add up quickly.

An Interesting Alternative

One benefit we recommend trying, which we almost never see being available for employees, is whole life insurance. Unlike the standard term life insurance companies may offer, whole life insurance is a plan that you can keep for your whole life which actually builds and retains value, and can be used by employees as an investment vehicle. With term insurance, if you don’t pass away during the term, you get nothing in return for your money. A whole life policy has guaranteed death benefits and cash value. (Learn more about the difference between term and whole life insurance.)

Why Offer Whole Life Insurance?

What are some of the other advantages of whole life insurance for your employees? Why offer this instead of or in addition to term life insurance?

• It Costs You Nothing
  • If you have 25 or more employees, you can offer your employees life insurance without having to pay for any coverage. You can choose to pay for some coverage for all your employees, but you don’t have to cover anything.
  • Employer groups between 10-24 employees can still offer the coverage, but are required to pay for $10,000 of coverage for each employee. Usually, this is still very inexpensive for employers.
• Employees Get Peace of Mind With Guaranteed Issue, No Medical Coverage
  • Employees in most business will be eligible for $100,000 of guaranteed issue coverage.
  • No medical underwriting required. An employee can have just been diagnosed with cancer, and still be eligible to receive guaranteed issue coverage.
  • Some coverage (up to $25,000) may also be available for spouses, and dependent children / grandchildren.
• Easy To Set Up And Administer
  • Employees can be enrolled quickly – usually in 15 minutes or less.
  • We typically meet with your employees (in-person or by zoom) one on one to make it incredibly easy for everyone involved.
  • This can be set up outside of your traditional employee benefits structure, so we can sig you up for this coverage and you can continue to work with your current employee benefits broker for other benefits.
• Portable Coverage With The Ability To Add More Coverage Annually
  • Where employees haven’t maxed out their guaranteed issue amount available, they have the ability to add to it annually. If they get diagnosed with cancer five years down the road and they are still working for you, they can go back and still get the guaranteed issue coverage.
  • Once employees reach the maximum guaranteed issue amount, an additional amount is made available annually for purchase, up to $250,000 per year with very limited medical underwriting.
  • Purchased coverage is portable, so once elected, your employees can take it with them when they leave. They can simply continue to pay their premiums and continue to receive the benefits.

Ultimately, there may be no magic sauce to hiring or retaining employees, but companies everywhere are expanding benefits available to employees. Set yourself apart from your competition by offering whole life insurance. You can make sure that your employees have financial security with guaranteed issue coverage—even those employees that may otherwise not have qualified medically. It’s a great benefit for your employees and you have nothing to lose because in many cases, it won’t cost the company a dime.

Want to learn more? Give Legacy Partners a call today at 586.209.4106 to speak with our life insurance team about how this can help you and your company.