The Value of Voluntary Benefits for Employees
Voluntary employee benefits provide significant amounts of value not only to the employees but to their companies as well. These benefits come in many different formats and cover a wide range of related and unrelated conditions that regular insurance may not, including fees associated with dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.
Let’s take a closer look at what voluntary benefits are, their many advantages, and then delve into a few of the many plan types that can be implemented into your programs.
What are Voluntary Benefits?
Otherwise known as voluntary group benefits, voluntary benefits are insurance benefits that complement existing healthcare options. They help provide employees with extra layers of security against medical issues, accidents, and expensive bills associated with other events like funeral costs.
Advantages of Voluntary Benefits
There are several benefits to investing in voluntary employee benefits options, including attracting of better employees, lowering coverage rates for employees, and tax deductions.
Attract Top Employees without Breaking the Company’s Bank
Every company wants to have the best employees in their business, and to do that they have to have benefits and features that no other company is providing in order to draw individuals in. Typically, people may think that raising salaries is the way to go here, but many have found that offering better benefits to potential employees is a better method of drawing them in.
Lower Coverage Rates for Employees
When you offer voluntary benefits to your employee workforce, you are able to purchase policies in bulk and at a discount. This in turn reduces costs for employees who would otherwise need to take out individual or family policies that would be exponentially more expensive.
Reduce Payroll Tax Costs
The insurance premiums your company pays usually come out of automatic, pre-tax payroll deductions. With this method of payment, employers end up having lesser tax bills for their payrolls as insurance fees are being subtracted before anything else. This means lowering the overall amount of money made before taxation.
Types of Voluntary Benefits
There are several different kinds of voluntary benefits that the majority of companies choose to offer their employees. These include dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.
Dental Insurance
Dental insurance can go a long way in reducing the costs associated with dental maintenance. It will usually cover x-rays and cleanings completely, with many plans also extending to cavities and costs associated with retainers or braces. Not all dental procedures will be completely erased with this plan, but their costs will be greatly offset.
Vision Insurance
Like dental insurance, vision insurance is a very popular form of voluntary insurance. It covers routine eye exams and usually offsets the costs associated with buying contact lenses or glasses. Additionally, some plans may cover more extensive procedures in part or completely.
Disability Insurance
Disability insurance comes in two different plan types consisting of long and short-term policies. They are designed to help cover a portion of an individual’s costs of living in the event they become injured or too sick to work. Shorter plans cover a period of three to six months on average and longer ones may run for five, ten, or even twenty years. Typically, these longer plans cover an individual through retirement age.
Life Insurance
This insurance type is not usually in place to protect the individual covered from unexpected expenses, but rather it is intended to offset the costs any beneficiaries may incur in the event of the policy holder’s death. It can cover funeral expenses, mortgage payments, unpaid bills, and much more.
Supplemental Voluntary Benefits
In addition to these key voluntary insurance types, there are also several supplemental voluntary benefits that are offered more rarely, but that are still of much value to employees.
Accident Insurance
If your employee is in an accident that required coverage not met in their existing health plans, accident insurance may be a good option to offer.
Critical Illness Insurance
This insurance type comes in handy if you have employees who suffer from serious medical conditions that are not fully covered by traditional health insurance. These conditions include, but are not limited to, heart attacks, seizures, and strokes.
Cancer Insurance
For any employee who is diagnosed with a type of cancer, this insurance type can become vital. Treatments, hospital stays, and other fees associated with cancer recovery are not cheap, and this specially-catered insurance type may be just the thing your employees need to help save them from financial distress.
Employee Benefits Made Easy
At Beckham Insurance Group, our knowledgeable and experienced employee benefits representatives are here to help make your benefits administration as easy and stress-free as possible. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you build a competitive and comprehensive benefits program.
