As another year draws to a close, we have begun to review our last 12 months and to review lessons learned in 2015. This year was better than any before, allowing us to help more companies and bringing much change. Join us as we break down our year in PEO and human capital.

What We Learned

6 years ago, when Dinsmore/Steele was founded, PEOs were a new concept to many companies.  2015 brought about Professional Employer Organizations (PEO) becoming a common discussion amongst companies. We saw this with more companies with a basic understanding of the PEO industry approaching is for help in finding the right PEO.  Back in the day, we were trailblazers and market-makers.  In 2015, PEOs PEO discussions started with most business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs already relatively familiar with the concept.

Employee Benefits

ACA and ObamaCare ushered in new demands and requirements on benefits reporting and the PEOs successfully navigated it for their clients. The majority of companies continued to offer three employee benefit plans - high, medium and low premium options to their employees.

The high plan was typically a PPO/POS, the medium plan being the same, but with a higher deductible size and the low plan being either a rich EPO, a HMO or a HDHP. On average, Employers contributed 72% of the single employee premium, amongst our clients.

The most popular plans were POS and PPO plans, as with years past.  The most popular carriers were, in order of client selection - Aetna, UHC/Oxford, Cigna and BC/BS. Regional plans that remained the most popular were Kaiser on the West Coast and Tufts in the New England area. Out of all our groups, the most popular coverage election was Single, with Family- a close second, Employee Spouse, third and Employee + Child(ren) rounding out the fourth spot.

Out of 1750 groups and across all plans quoted, the average Single rate was $644.00, Employee + Spouse $783.00, Employee + Child(ren) $874.00 and Family $1,438.00.

 Workers’ Compensation

Always a necessary evil and immensely valuable when an employee is injured - you’ll always find Workers’ Compensation.

This year, we expanded our network and worked with more groups that are outside of the White and Gray Collar worker groups and inside the Blue Collar Group. We saved our clients, on average, $3,400 a year for White Collar, $4,350 a year for Gray, and $11,838 for Blue Collar costs.

The most popular carriers used for our clients this year were AIG, AmTrust, and Hartford. The majority of our clients, before joining a PEO, used their respective State’s Workers’ Compensation Fund and our most popular WC codes were 8810 and 8742.

Payroll and Taxes

Payroll is the most important aspect of any business, even more so to your staff. Whether it’s the first, fifteenth or the thirtieth, it’s the number one reason that we all work and this year was no different. The most popular pay cycle amongst our clients, this year, was Bi-Weekly.  Semi-Monthly was second, Weekly came in third and Monthly continued to be the least popular.

Our combined total, for wages amongst all of our clients, was over $3.2 Billion, with taxes being paid in over 47 states (it was 42 last year), so we added five more states. Most bonuses were paid in December, which is no news and the second most popular time for bonuses was June.

 Human Resources

No year would be complete without HR and companies without an HR presence never lasts long. HR creates your culture and gives your employees guidance as to who, what, when, where and how everything is done. A strong HR infrastructure will make or break your company and HR was never more important than this year.

The most popular request of our clients for HR this year was Employee Handbooks.  PTO Policy documents were second and Offer Letters were a distant third. In 2015, many of our clients changed their Paid Time Off policies to unlimited - doing so was a great benefit to their employees. California State posed the greatest legal challenge to doing so, for our clients.

On average, our clients used the PEO HR departments an average of 10.2 hours per month, and over 739 issues and counting were resolved.

Our Numbers and Data

We quoted over 1750 companies in 2015, generated over 7,500 various calculations to produce our proposals, and presented over 1534 various medical plans and options. The average time it took to produce a proposal was 17.5 minutes from the final quote.  We logged 481.3 hours on our conference call lines and used Join.me to present over 1728 times.

Our average time to quote a company, from start to finish, was 5.6 days, 3.5 average revisions to each proposal presented (and only four reams of paper to do it all). On average, we saved our clients, versus companies not using us for quoting, 35% on all PEO costs.

Our goal for 2016 is to save our clients and prospective ones, even more, reduce our paper consumption to even less, and increase the efficiency of how we price, shop, compare, and help companies choose the right PEO for their needs.