4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

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Signs Your Company Needs a Systemic Wage Raise

Over three million Americans have left the workforce since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. From baby boomers retiring at record rates to a drop in women in the workforce, current employment conditions might be causing problems for your business. The labor market is tight. Meanwhile, inflation and an uncertain economy are leading many to question their career goals. In such an environment, it might be time to institute a systemic wage raise across your organization, modernizing the way you pay your workers.

Why Your Employees' Financial Problems Are Your Problems

While most organizations understand that wellness programs lead to more engaged and productive employees, forward-thinking ones understand that financial wellness must also be considered as part of the package, especially in the middle of a pandemic. Financial wellness is a crucial part of mental and emotional health, and the reality is that lots of people are currently worried about their finances.

Administering The Payroll Process Smoothly

One of the essential parts of any company is the people who work in it. The work team is the differentiating value of a business organization, as it has the skills and knowledge necessary for companies to meet the proposed objectives and plans. There are several factors that must be taken into account before hiring staff. One of them is payroll. In simple words, payroll is the financial record of your employee’s wages, bonuses, and deductions.

How to Use Benefits to Attract Top Millennial Talent

"Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of Millennials". Dynamic Signal

Trends show that by 2021, half of the talent pipeline in the United States will be composed of millennials. This massive influx of talent flooding the market has employers scrambling to the offensive. They are overhauling their talent management strategies by offering progressive and innovative workplaces to attract, attain and retain top millennial candidates moving forward into the future.

Benefits brokers can help companies gain a competitive advantage by attracting top millennial talent with enticing, premier benefits package offerings.

Unlike older generations who have traditionally aimed to find a high paying company and remain loyal for many years, millennials have adjusted their career goals and strategy. As pay is still important in the decision-making process, the traditional and voluntary benefits that employers offer will be just as or more scrutinized as they decide to take a position or not. Unlike past generations, they crave more than a cold check at the end of the pay period.

How To Ask For A Raise

Women work for free for more than two months of the year because of the gender pay gap. To help women fight for equal pay on International Women’s Day, we want to provide some support and advice.

Asking for a raise can take you completely out of your comfort zone but in today’s economic climate if you don’t ask you often don’t get what you think you are worth. Here are some tips on getting that raise you feel you deserve from Instant Offices:

How often should you expect a raise?
Let’s face it we live in tough economic times at the moment. In the past it used to be the norm to expect a raise once a year, that is no longer the case and it’s typically up to you to request a salary review.

Preparation and planning
Determining how much you should earn is not easy but there are helpful salary calculators that will help determine the range you should be expecting. The other opportunity is to look for job adverts that cover your skills and experience to get a benchmark. If you do that you need to add an element of realism to the process so don’t set your expectations at the highest salary, pick the average across the job ads you have researched.

Four Ways To Boost Job Satisfaction Without Giving Employees A Raise

Employee satisfaction has been declining steadily over the past few decades. In 1987, 61.1 percent of employees reported job satisfaction. By 2016, this had dropped to 45 percent. Compensation is the top or second-rated driver of employee satisfaction for employees of all age groups, Society for Human Resource Management research shows. Giving your employees a raise is obviously going to make them happier with their job, but it’s not always feasible for budgetary reasons. Fortunately, there are also non-financial incentives you can give employees that will help improve their satisfaction and engagement. Here are four ways you can boost your workers’ job satisfaction besides giving them a raise.

Three Common Payroll Problems And How To Handle Them

In 2013, the Internal Revenue Service administered 6.8 million penalties for payroll reporting errors, costing businesses $4.5 billion, according to IRS data. About 45 percent of businesses incur an average of $845 per year in payroll penalties, according to statistics cited by the SBA. In addition to IRS penalties, payroll problems can hurt your cash flow, create friction with your employees and threaten the livelihood of your business. Here are some tips on how to avoid some of the most common payroll mistakes.

Misclassifying Employees as Contractors

One of the most common payroll mistakes is misclassifying employees as independent contractors or vice versa, according to Accounting Today. How you classify employees affects whether you use a W-2 or 1099 to report their compensation, whether they are subject to federal income tax and employment tax withholding, and whether they are entitled to benefits.

Avoid this problem by correctly classifying employees and contractors when you hire them. If you discover you have improperly classified employees, you should check into the IRS' Voluntary Classification Settlement Program. The VCSP lets eligible employers reclassify workers as employees for future taxes, while providing partial relief from federal employment taxes by letting you pay 10 percent of the liability that would have been due during the past tax year under reduced rates.

With respect to contractors, you should obtain a W-9 before paying them to avoid a potential mandatory backup withholding at a 28 percent rate. You must also generally issue a 1099 to contractors to avoid penalties, with some exceptions as in the case of contracting corporate entities. For both employees and contractors, avoid paperwork problems by using the Social Security Administration's website to verify Social Security Numbers.

Money is the Worst Incentive

The most typical motivation plan is to reward top performers and ignore everyone else. It is common knowledge that if you want something done at work, offer a bonus!
The problem is that this commonly used technique for motivating employees does not work! Senior management may be notorious for offering cash incentives in an effort to encourage (or manipulate) us to do more but, it turns out, we are not as manipulable as some bosses think we are.

Dan H. Pink, a leader in motivation, work and management, explains that the way we think about cash bonuses is backwards from what we would expect. Interestingly, studies show bonuses actually de-motivate workers instead of encouraging them. In a clever RSA video Pink explains how rewarding top performers causes worse performance and that when employees are paid enough money, it is possible to incentivize them using other, far more successful, techniques that result in increased engagement and loyalty.

In his video, Pink lists three things that actually do lead to better performance:

Autonomy: the desire we all share to direct our own lives. There is proof that the more autonomous we feel at work the higher the levels of employee engagement will be.

Mastery: We all want to get better at something. This is why some of us use our free time to learn how to play the guitar or study photography; we aspire to learn a new skill or craft for the pleasure and satisfaction.

Purpose: we all want to feel like we are making a contribution. If money and profits matter without a sense of purpose bad things happen. Service becomes lame, products are bad and work becomes uninspiring.

Don't Let Money Prevent You From Hiring The Best

9 Strategies for Hiring the Talent you Can't Afford

Hiring new talent is a tremendous sign that you are growing and prospering.

You want to hire the best you possible can to keep that momentum going but how you define ‘the best’ could be costing you more in the long run. On paper you may decide that you can only afford to pay a new hire x amount of dollars and you may also be aware that talent costs more than you can afford to pay. Do you lower your expectations? Absolutely not. Our research has shown consistently for over 20 years that pay is not what motivates people. In fact compensation is at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs for employees. This is important to know when you are looking to hire ‘the best’ so you don’t let the number interfere with who you want to hire, first of all. Second, you need some strategies to help attract top talent, the people who want more than just a dollar figure when it comes to finding the right job.

What Could be Wrong with Unlimited Vacation Time?

The Pros and Cons of PTO

The idea of unlimited vacation sounds intriguing but is it feasible? Besides sounding like an employee’s dream, strategically, it is a tool that can be used to benefit recruiting, reflect a culture of trust and ease administrative burdens. Like so many ideas that sound too good to be true, it can lead to bigger problems if it’s not managed properly. This is one reason companies are slow to adopt and are watching to see the outcome from Sir Richard Branson’s move to adopt unlimited PTO at The Virgin Group. If all goes well for Virgin, this could be a model for other big companies to follow.

According to an article in Employee Benefit News by Dane Hurtubise, less than 1% of US corporations currently offer unlimited vacation days. It is gaining popularity as companies like Netflix, Best Buy, Evernote and Motley Fool adopt the program, however. In terms of employee engagement, unlimited vacation days has considerable merit because it implies a strong relationship between employee and employer, based on trust, which is one of the foundations for achieving engagement. But just like as adopting an open office plan, ‘each company should carefully evaluate and research if it is right for them’.

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