Enzo: Thank you for joining us today. My name is Enzo and I’m the founder of Accounting Pros. I’m delighted to welcome you to our webinar on The Future of Work: Flexible Benefits, Remote Policies and Retention in 2025. Before we dive in, just a few housekeeping items. This session is being recorded and will be shared with all the registrants afterwards..
Please submit your questions tHRough the webinar chat. We’ll make sure that we get those answered at the end of the session. And if you have any technical difficulties or have any issues hearing us or anything, just let us know tHRough the chat so we our team can hop in and assist.
Now, let’s get this party started. If you are a small business owner facing today’s changing workplace challenges, you’re in the right place. Today’s session is specifically designed to help you create a resilient and engaged team in an environment where employee expectations continue to transform.
I’m tHRilled to introduce our resident expert, Dan Eov, who brings his extensive experience helping small businesses develop HR strategies that actually work in the real world. Dan, before we begin, could you tell our audience a bit about your background and what led you to become so passionate about small business HR?
Dan: Thanks, Enzo. So my name’s Dan Evanoff, as you said. I have a background in human resources and operations. I’ve really helped companies of all sizes manage change, establish workforce strategies, and what I really love is helping businesses drive workforce alignment, finding and developing talent, and really creating high performance workplaces.
In my opinion, HR is the backbone of every business, especially small businesses. People management, operations and compliance, in my mind, are the oil that keep the machine running. I think that small businesses are especially vulnerable to HR risks, especially in 2025 because they typically don’t have a dedicated HR team.
And really having proactive HR strategies can help reduce risk. It improves employee retention and it enables growth. So that’s me and why I love it.
Enzo: I’m so glad that you’re here. Those are things that I am not skilled with. I’m more on the accounting side, and I absolutely love it.
But I love hearing, your perspective about how to help small businesses, including our own with HR. And I’m wondering from your perspective with small businesses, what HR challenges are you seeing right now that owners might not even be aware of that are affecting their team?
Dan: Great. Top of mind immediately employee misclassification jumps to mind.
I see a lot of common errors with independent contractor versus employee classifications exempt versus non-exempt classifications. And both of those are serious risks that can lead to hefty fines and penalties. This also includes, in my mind, engaging with offshore talent, which a lot of businesses are doing now.
And even though working with offshore talent is very cost effective. There are still risks associated with that type of workforce. Hiring contractors is a very viable solution, but businesses do need to be very aware of the risks involved and not just from a compliance standpoint, which can equal fines and penalties, but from a people management standpoint as well.
Other challenges that I’m seeing in the world especially 2025, burnout and talent retention both cause a loss of productivity for businesses and they can increase costs. And not having a flexible work environment or clear paths for career advancement is really making it harder for businesses to attract top talent.
So those are my top factors that I am always having conversations with clients nowadays, especially as we continue into this ever evolving world of work.
Enzo: So that’s just a very short list of the things that are challenging us right now. It seems like it’s like uh growing list every single day.
One thing that you’d mentioned is burnout. And I know that’s a really common thing, especially among owners who are doing many things at once. But even teams, who are wearing many hats, they experience burnout a lot. So I’m curious, what does burnout actually look like in a virtual or hybrid environment?
We work all remotely, and it’s not really that obvious to me what burnout looks like if I’m not sitting next to somebody. So how can we identify that?
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m glad you said it like that because unless you’re having constant check-ins with your team burnout could go unnoticed. So burnout to me from what I’ve seen, what I’ve experienced is, number one, is an increase in work errors.
You can see that across the board, slower response times from team members. Typically, they’re just not engaged anymore. You can see more unplanned absences and really just an overall lack of employee engagement. Those all to me encompass that burnout mindset. And if you think about it, quiet quitting, that is a term that we’ve heard a lot of lately.
To me that’s just burnout In disguise. Employees aren’t refusing to work. They’re exhausted from unclear expectations, from overwork, and from feeling undervalued. And if they’re not finding it at your business, they will go elsewhere.
Enzo: Yeah. I think burnout is especially common in the accounting field.
I know that many other businesses have their employees working 60, 70 hours a week during busy season, and sometimes even in the off season, they’re working crazy hours. And I know it can be expensive because when somebody is burnt out, you mentioned they might go somewhere else and you have to go find a new person, which is, also expensive.
So how does this impact the bottom line of small businesses?
Dan: It’s huge. It’s one of the most expensive factors that any small business, any business can have is their employees and replacing talent. I did see that I’ll have to look at my notes. I think it was the American Psychological Association.
They’re saying that burnout reduces efficiency by something like 50% which is a significant amount. . And not only does burnout cost money from that perspective, but then you’re having high turnover and replacing an employee can be upwards of 200% of the employee’s salary.
So worst case scenario, if you lose an employee that’s making $60,000 a year, worst case scenario, being able to fully replace that employee could cost you $120,000 a year. So not knowing that these burnout situations are impacting your employees it’s very significant to your business, to your productivity, to your clients, everything.
Enzo: So if somebody is 50% less effective and that, that means that things are stacking up, you’ve got a ton of work that’s just not getting done. But I also imagine that’s adding additional strain to other members of the team who are also gonna get burned out. So it’s a downward spiral where you’re just like, everything is going badly at the same time.
So probably better to address the burnout way ahead of time so you don’t affect the entire team and create, I don’t know, an exodus where people are going to your competitors to go find work.
Dan: That’s right. Absolutely. .
Enzo: What about things like work and personal life boundaries? I know for me that’s hard.
I work from home and that can be hard for other people who work from home. But is there anything that you can do some practices that you can employ that work well for small teams without a huge HR department that’s sitting there shaking their finger “you have to have a boundary madam”, you know what can small business owners do?
Dan: Oh it’s so hard because I’m the same way. I’m a workaholic, I think. So it’s hard for me to set my own boundaries, but what I’ve seen successful with current clients and folks I’ve worked with in the past and really low cost solutions are implementing, easy solves.
Like no meeting days. Sometimes we’re on back-to-back meetings all day long, and we don’t actually get any work done because we’re just on calls. And that can be overwhelming. And that alone can cause some burnout. So no meeting days allows for teams to focus on all of their tasks. Another one that I really like is having a no questions asked mental health PTO policy where people can just take a mental health day and not have the stigma of, needing to say they have a mental health situation or anything like that. And just allowing that to be a policy that if you need that time off, take it. I would much rather have an employee take one day off and then come back refreshed than worry about them not being able to take time off because they have so much building up on their plate.
So it all leads into what we’re talking about. And I guess from my perspective though, the leaders really set the model for this behavior. So if they’re, like, as you said if you are working around the clock, how are you going to make sure that your team doesn’t feel that same stigma? Some other easy solutions there that I found that work really well is delaying after hours emails.
So if you’re sending an email after hours, and I know you’re really good at this, Enzo just making sure it, you call it out that you don’t need to answer it right away, or making it so it actually hits their inbox at the next day, or even a Zoom or Slack message can be delayed.
And then really encouraging time off for your employees making sure they know they don’t have to be answering emails when they are on, requested PTO.
Enzo: I am terrible about working late into the evening, but I’m also a night owl, so I’ll start later in the day and also work later in the day.
But you’re right, I do mention to people, Hey, I know you’re not in the office and don’t worry about this. Or I ask people to turn off their notifications if I’m sending them, notes during their dinnertime. And I think that’s really healthy because I don’t want people to feel like they have to jump in immediately and solve a problem or answer a question.
And I have used the send later function inside of Gmail to send an email, the next day. So it’s not bothering people at night. And then modeling good practices around time off. I take. Days off, multiple days in a row just to work on things that will move the business forward.
And I let people know I’m not having meetings. You can hit me up on Zoom, but I’ll be slow to get back to you. And I encourage that people, that’s how they work if that they need to have long stretches of time. Just do a block on your calendar to make sure that you’re not being interrupted and you can actually focus on the things that you’d like to focus on.
And we actually look at time off inside of Gusto, which is our payroll software. And make sure that if there’s people who haven’t taken time off, towards the middle of the year, they’ve gotten all the way to June and they’ve only taken one or two days off, we call them out privately and say, “Hey, it looks like you’ve not taken any time off. Even if you don’t want to go somewhere, do a staycation and stay home, or just get off of work emails for a whole week and go do something fun. Go for a walk with your dog”. Because I know not everybody has the freedom to travel, but you can take a few days off because you’re getting paid for it. So that type of encouragement I think is healthy, especially if you’re in an environment with a limitless policy where you don’t have only two weeks. I think the tendency, if you’ve got unlimited PTO is no one takes time off. , It has the opposite effect, which I don’t want to happen. But I would encourage people to investigate is your team actually taking time off or should you nudge them gently and say like, “Hey, now it’s time to go take a break.”
Dan: Sure.
Enzo: Yeah. And that can be
Dan: not just the unlimited PTO policy, but just PTO in general. If you’re having these folks never take time off and they’re just building and accruing all of that pay time off. And that’s a liability for you, especially in some states where you have to pay that out.
Enzo: Another thing I was gonna mention is I’m in Colorado and we have many employees in Colorado and in Colorado we have paid family leave that you can take for the birth of a child or a couple other reasons. And we have employees that are working remotely in places that don’t have that type of policy built into their laws. So one thing that we’ve done for those people as well is purchase short term disability policies and which allows them to get a portion of their salary and we cover the rest. So if you’re a small business owner and you’ve got, 10 or a few people, or 20, or fewer people, and you don’t have the budget to pay for all this time off and, it can feel really heavy, but you still wanna honor people’s I don’t know their life, they want, if they’re a parent.
Things like that. Getting something in place ahead of time, that’s been really helpful for us because it allows us to offer even better benefits to our team who might not live in a place like Colorado. And then letting people know it’s okay to take time off. You’re not gonna be penalized for it. We actually encourage it because I feel like people do think, oh, if I ask for this time, it’s gonna ding me in some kind of way, which it’s not.
Dan: Of course. Yeah. It’s super important to have those type of mechanisms in place. One to just have that benefit for all of your employees, but also it helps continue to maintain those boundaries that people are able to take time off and focus on themselves, whatever that may be
Enzo: True. So one thing that I have also noticed is that sometimes people feel isolated when they work from home.
We’ve been working from home since 2013, but I know Covid really changed the way that people work, a lot of people have returned to office, but many are still working from home. And I think like the isolation from covid, isolation from remote work was a double whammy.
I know now things are getting a little bit easier, but I know it’s a challenge. So how can we see the signals or signs that somebody might be feeling disconnected and isolated on your team.
Dan: Yeah. Great. Super important topic. And it’s not as bad as when it was covid time or, I guess we’re in after covid, so AC time. But some of the signs of isolation that, that are apparent to me when I’m connecting with folks one-on-one is, their lack of engagement in meetings. Number one, you, I think you can tell right away, especially if you’ve been working with someone for a while.
They have reduced responsiveness like I talked about earlier with the burnout. So if you’re Slack messaging them or something and it takes ’em hours to reply, are they really that busy or are they just, not engaged anymore? And that lack of engagement and disconnectedness is all part of that isolation, I think.
And if they’re just working solely in a a room by themselves and they don’t have a lot of interaction with their colleagues we can start to see that grow and we might start to see them miss deadlines or again, see increased mistakes in their work. All of those signs lead to being disconnected.
And how do we solve that? And it’s really that engagement with these folks and making sure you’re constantly checking in on them and not just for their work performance, checking on in on them as a person. Because that’s part of this whole thing is we’re people. The human element in human resources is very important.
It’s the, as I said, the oil that keeps the machine running. And something that we’ve seen a lot of success with is implementing the regular employee pulse surveys, which you can do through Gusto and other systems. Gustos is really easy. That just sends an anonymous email and it allows employees to really give critical feedback on how they’re feeling, how things are going, and what the actual pulse of the environment looks like.
However, if leaders aren’t doing anything with that data, just having the surveys does nothing just collects data and for what reason? If you aren’t actually taking action on some of these. And what we’ve seen work really well is that we’ve been able to help business leaders address issues with their employees, maybe just one employee long before they become serious problems.
So we’re avoiding any type of turnover or anything like that by just addressing small changes right away based off of these survey results. If you don’t have that in place, I’d highly encourage it. And that’s something that we help a lot of our business leaders set up from day one.
Enzo: So I would say that it’s almost worse to not do anything with the survey results. That if you’re not gathering information, it’s one thing, but if you’re gathering it and people are giving you their honest feedback, they’re taking the time to fill those surveys out and you’re just like not doing anything at all from the employee side, they might think, “they don’t actually care about what I’m saying.
They’re not even mentioning it”. Or it’s just, off getting lost in the ether. One thing that we do is on our calls with our team, we have all team calls at least once a month, usually twice a month. And we talk about the survey results and say things like, we’ve heard this or this was brought up.
And we obviously can’t say who left the feedback because it’s all completely anonymous. I have no way of knowing who has left that feedback. But it’s helpful because it stirs conversation. It helps us to really get to the root of the problem. And I always feel a little disappointed when somebody leaves a survey answer that’s, I’m not totally satisfied, but doesn’t give the comment.
So we do encourage that people leave those comments so that we can help address the problem. But really that, like Dan said, it’s so easy to get set up inside of Gusto. And the number one question that we look at and track month over month is a question that gets asked every single time.
Would you recommend Accounting Prose as a great place to work? And I think it’s important that we track that because that’s really our Employee Happiness score. And without that tracking over time, hard to see the, the dips and valleys and everything and see what’s been going on.
And I can literally point to where people are unhappy and I know, oh, that’s what happened. We were filing PPP applications and everybody was working around the clock, or that was the toughest 1099 season we’ve ever had, so of course, people are gonna be unhappy, but it really helps us to even maintain our own accountability.
As a leader, I wanna make sure that we are always considering the happiness of our team because our team is what makes Accounting Prose great. But I would like to ask a follow up question to you, Dan. Practical ways that people can create meaningful connections.
We tried to do a retreat before. It is so hard to get everybody on the same, same schedule. Okay, you’re from here, you’re from here. We got kids and dogs and cats and partners. Now everybody, let’s leave all that and come do an in-person thing. It’s also very expensive. But what are some ways that you can create some connections with your team if you’re not working together in an office?
Dan: First off, I think. Having those in-person moments are so important. It puts that humanity back in. I can always tell when I go and engage with someone in person, it’s such a different experience than just this virtual. But with that being said this is the environment we’re in now.
This is the new world of work. And some of these things that I’ve seen that have worked and have been really successful is just utilizing our chat features that we have. So we use Zoom but I know a lot of folks use Slack or Teams or any of those other tools, and I think it’s really useful to help folks create virtual social spaces.
So for instance. Having channels that are just like a break room that replace the coffee station where you would go have just a chat with somebody that was waiting for their cup of coffee or like we have, which I really love is our pets channel which allows us to share pictures of our pets.
It’s always brings happiness to us. And then I really like the randomness of it as well, being able to share memes or just other funny things that aren’t necessarily work related, but, it just gives that levity to the whole situation that, we’re all in this together. So I really like that.
And then some things that I think are successful beyond just the social aspect of Slack or Zoom is we’ve helped some clients implement buddy like systems. So pairing. Maybe a more junior person with a senior person. So one, they get some real world example of what’s going on in the business.
For a more senior person. The senior person can get to know the more junior person. And what I feel is that creates a lot of long-term value and a long-term connections. Really connects people that wouldn’t normally be connected on the teams in ways that I think does add a lot of value.
The only problem that I see with that is people get busy. We’re all busy. You mentioned a few times we’re so busy that, things get outta hand sometimes. So it’s really critical to make sure that if we do set up some type of buddy like system that we are being consistent with that and then making sure that people are having those meetings because they do add a lot of value once you, you know, get past that initial stage.
And I encourage that always.
Enzo: I really like the idea of a buddy system because if I try to onboard somebody and I’m their buddy and they are unhappy about something or something isn’t really working out during the onboarding process, maybe they’re confused about a process. The likelihood of them coming to me and telling me, “Hey, Enzo, this isn’t working”, is so low.
I think because I’m the boss, so if they have somebody who feels more like a peer, even if the person is more senior to them. I think that they’re just more honest with that person and they’re able to feel a bit safer than the person who cuts their checks. So having a person who’s not in charge, I think that’s great.
And then another thing that we do is we have a quarterly social gathering where we just have a fun activity around the, like winter time we’re doing a holiday gift exchange, which is really nice. But other times we’ve done paintings or we’ve made bird houses or puzzles, or we do, I don’t know, just like fun, just fun games.
And it just gets silly for a little while. It’s only an hour, maybe two hours, depending on how much time everybody has. I give everybody Ramp cards, which are expense cards where you can just, put it into Uber Eats and buy yourself some pizza and have it sent to you. Doesn’t work for me because I live in the mountains and nothing can be delivered, but everybody else gets to participate in that.
But it’s good, we just have a, a few minutes together, a couple hours not terribly long. We plan for it in advance, so everybody has that time blocked off, and it’s just a good way to connect. It’s hard to see everybody’s personalities all the time, just in brief conversations, but I, I could see like how funny everybody is on my team, so it’s really great for me.
Dan: I agree. I think that’s a super value add for people to be able to disconnect for, even if it is an hour it’s a, it’s really meaningful in my opinion.
Enzo: Right. So, being a small business, sometimes the hierarchy really isn’t there. There isn’t like manager or I don’t know, middle manager.
There’s a, some small teams may be built, maybe a few people with a boss above them, but generally you can have a fairly flat structure whenever you’re getting started, even under 50 employees, you could still have that. I know that we’ve had people ask us questions, ” what other positions are available” or “what are growth opportunities exist?”
I know that people worry that they might get looked over for promotions or they might I don’t know, stunt their career if they’re not, constantly rising tHRough the ranks. So if you’ve got a flat structure, what are things that you can do to help people, grow their career.
Dan: Great.
That super important question as well especially with small businesses that may not have, there’s not a ton of opportunities because you’re a small business, you are growing, but. That doesn’t necessarily put a timeline for folks to be able to follow a clear, linear path. So how I like to look at it is growth isn’t just promotions.
I think that’s super important to consider that cross training being able to learn other parts of the business which adds a lot of value in terms of just coverage in general, if someone’s outta the office. But mentorship programs, I think that goes in line exactly with that buddy system.
Learning from a more senior person always helped me as I was evolving in my career. And then being able to take on project leadership type roles or functions if you have a new client or just a new, project that’s happening and being able to give someone the chance to, spearhead that without, adding too much onto their plate.
But beyond that, I think having clearly defined roles and responsibilities really allows employees to understand, what they’re doing, what others are doing within the business, and what advancement looks like within the company if there is advancement opportunities. So they can really, have that tone set and be aligned right from the beginning of what they’re doing to save a lot of time and a lot of confusion in the future.
So being able to, have those roles and responsibilities set out and defined I guess that’s the number one thing.
Enzo: I think that having clear roles and responsibilities also goes back to burnout. If you have those things defined, then you know, at least for our team, we’ve got accountants who do more of the ongoing work.
We have onboarding accountants, we have controllers and a state and local tax team. And, each role has their own responsibilities. And if. It wasn’t clearly defined. Somebody might wonder, is this a me thing or is that a you thing or is that somebody you know who’s actually gonna be doing this work?
And I think it’s been really helpful just for a bit of clarity and also just to bring the stress down, okay, I’m an onboarding accountant, I’m gonna take it the file this far. And then you get to work with your ongoing accountant and there’s a bit of a handoff and everybody knows what everybody else is doing.
But it also gives people the opportunity to know I’m currently in this role, but this other thing, it sounds kinda interesting now that I’ve read the job description. And they know that even though we don’t have crazy hierarchy in our business, that there’s different places you can go and try different things.
And sometimes it doesn’t work out. We’ve had somebody not work out in a position and go back to a position they were in before. And I think that’s also fine, but just being able to know that those positions even exist is probably the good place to start, I think. And speaking of that, if that person could have left a business, they could have quit.
And that would’ve been awful because they’re one of my favorite people. And it just wasn’t a good fit. And replacing talent is so expensive. You can go to a recruiter and it’s sometimes a percentage of the wage for the year, and that could be a really high upfront cost. Also, having to retrain and onboard new employees, that’s all really expensive.
I’m wondering, Dan what are the costs of somebody walking out the door? You mentioned it could be up to 200% of their person’s salary, but what are some of the, those costs involved?
Dan: Sure. You have first off, I just wanted to back up a little bit. I think being flexible and having that.
HR hat on when you’re thinking about moving people into roles and it maybe doesn’t work, and giving them the opportunity to fall back into the role they were in. I think that shows a lot of trust and builds a lot of loyalty within the employees. So I think that’s fantastic. But the costs, so right away, if you have someone walk out the door, you’re losing productivity, you’re disrupting business.
You’re impacting clients potentially if you don’t have someone to be able to backfill that right away, you’re adding pressure on your existing staff which causes all the burnout things we were talking about. But then finding the new talent. So your recruitment costs, your sourcing costs taking time outta your day to interview these folks.
All of these have incremental costs that keep adding up. And not only are they disrupting internally they will eventually interrupt externally with your clients. And ultimately that’s what’s driving your business, is your clients. So all of those things continue to build and just cause disruption.
So even though you’re. The cost is up to 200%. You’re adding all of those little things in which is why you’re almost doubling that employee’s salary just to bring in someone else to replace them, let alone the time that it’s gonna take for them to get up to speed. Which I think is why we’re looking at that 200% cost is because, we can’t just turn on a new person tomorrow.
This is gonna take potentially three to, six months to find the right fit to bring someone in.
Enzo: People aren’t robots or machines. We can’t just turn a key and all of a sudden they’re able to do everything perfectly every time. There’s gonna be some, getting to know the business and learning your processes.
One thing that we do to speed up that introductory period is we document all of our processes. We bring people through our onboarding process, with larger concepts, you know, what do we do and then how do we do it, and exactly how do we do it? Who do we do it for? And it’s all documented in Notion.
And I find that’s really helpful because then you don’t have to have a person sitting next to somebody else training them. And then there’s always written documentation for someone to look back at if they get confused or forget. I know that there’s a lot going on the first couple days of working at a new business and super hard to retain everything.
And also you might feel a little bit, you know, silly. Like, I don’t remember exactly how you told me that, I didn’t write it down. So having that all documented, I think is a great way to handle that. But man, it is so hard to find good people when you find them. You gotta keep ’em forever.
And one way that we do that, of course, is having a really welcoming wonderful, wonderful team. We talked about, we’ve got lots of time off and everything, and some unique benefits, the short term disability for people who are in states without PMFLA. But I’m wondering, Dan working with other small businesses there’s so many different benefits that you can offer.
How do you even figure out, what should you be offering, how do you talk with the team and also not overwhelm the business owner? What is your process for that?
Dan: Sure. Benefits is very, it’s a broad term, it doesn’t just mean health benefits or paid time off or paid sick leave type of short term disability.
In, in my experience, the benefits can incorporate good company culture. I think having that really drives a lot of folks to stay in a business. Having good leadership that’s willing to roll up their sleeves and get into the weeds with you when necessary, if it gets overwhelming or if something’s not working correctly so that we can fix it.
Flexible work options is a huge benefit for folks nowadays. That’s what we’ve been talking about this whole call. Really allowing people to take that time off or be able to, feel comfortable having that time off and not responding to emails or the quiet times. Professional development opportunities are huge as well.
Being able to advance in your career I think outweighs higher salary in perceived value most of the time because people want to feel valued and it doesn’t necessarily always mean that they get, paid lunches or something like that. I think that the benefits can encompass quite a bit large amount of things that don’t break the bank.
Other solutions that we’ve seen work, of course, are phantom stock options commission bonuses, those type of things. And those provide long-term incentives without increasing fixed costs. Which I think all business owners are focused on, especially if there’s a growing business, they’re always trying to keep those costs low and to keep the costs low and maintain your talent.
You gotta look at all of these options.
Enzo: Yeah, that’s a lot. There’s so many things that you can offer when you’re working to understand, what are the right set of benefits to offer, what’s your discovery look like?
Dan: I think that really depends on, I think first off that company culture what does that look like?
What does the business owner think is important? And then talking through that I think part of those surveys that we were talking about really gets a sense of where the employees are at as well. Some employees might find some things far more important than others. An employee with a large family may look at health benefits way more important than someone that’s able to work a flexible schedule or work remotely or things like that.
So it really just comes down to having that discussion and what kind of team you’re trying to build or already have built and what is important to them. So it, it comes down to that personal aspect of it and really understanding what’s driving your team and how do you encourage them to give you that information, share information, and really be able to build that benefits package around that.
Enzo: So you actually got me thinking. We have people in, gosh, I think we’re in like 10 states now, probably about that. And one of the biggest challenges we had in offering health insurance was being able to offer coverage that would be helpful and useful for everybody on the team. At one point we had people living really, really rurally and you know, you have your doctor that you go to, they’re on your plan or you visited them forever and you wanna keep them.
So if we offer a different health insurance, like maybe you won’t even get to see that doctor anymore and you gotta go find a new doctor, which is really hard. So one thing that we do is a QSEHRA and that allows us to offer a tax free stipend or taxable depending on how the benefits, paid.
But. A stipend for our employees to go and get health insurance coverage or to pay for their health insurance coverage on their partner’s plan, which is, I thought really helpful. If we offered health insurance and they already had a really great policy with their partner’s plan then and the switch to our policy and it was worse, that doesn’t really help them.
And if they don’t take the benefit, then they feel like they’re losing out on it. Offering them that stipend, whether it’s paid by them or paid on their partner’s plan was really helpful. Even things like covering people who were on Tricare, which is the military health coverage.
We’ve had some people who’ve had partners on in the military and that’s something that can be covered on the QSEHRA including prescriptions, chiropractics, glasses, all kinds of stuff that if you don’t hit the max with your coverage amount, if you’ve got, I dunno, $600 in coverage and then you only spend $400, you’ve got some extra money to play with.
So it also allows you to, cover those things as well. And I felt like tearing my hair out. I was trying to figure out health insurance and it is already so confusing. And then we’ve thrown the other side, which is health insurance, but everywhere, all the same time.
So how do I do that? And that really allowed us to give people something that they were. Need without it, being based on what I think that they need, I think you need to be on Blue Cross. Well, Maybe not. So, um, but It’s a good option for sure. Um, it, It
Dan: definitely is. And it provides a lot of value and it certainly is easier than having multiple plans to be able to support your multiple locations.
And I know it, it is confusing even that plan by itself can be confusing and it’s important to be able to tap on someone like me or to be able to answer questions for your employees and, be able to take that onus off of your plate or business owner’s plate and just add that support.
And I really like to be able to do that for our clients as well, and talk directly to their employees and really help those business owners understand that everything is okay and that we’re able to explain everything to their employees in a way that allows them to feel like they have everything in place.
Enzo: Yeah. You put together like benefit packages where you just explained this is your coverage and this is who you need to talk to. If you have deeper broker related questions, that’s all really helpful to have as part of your onboarding. And I also think, as an employee talking to an HR person versus the owner of the business about what benefits are available or what benefits you want, I think you’re able to have deeper conversations that I think that the owner does wanna have anyway.
So it’s good to have somebody else in there to help.
Dan: Definitely. They may not wanna have the conversations, but timing, they’re too busy. They’re focused on growing their business. They don’t need to be in their business.
Enzo: Yeah, exactly. Well kind of switching focus a little bit . You and I had a conversation yesterday about whether or not remote work actually works. And I know that it does. But there’s a lot of people who are returning to office and that creates all kinds of new challenges, especially if you are living far away. But I wanna hear, how do you know that remote work is a viable option? And do you have to do it all at once?
Are you gonna have to go all in or can you dip your toe in the water? Just let’s talk about that. It’s super interesting to me.
Dan: Sure. I for one know it works. I think that most businesses that experienced Covid know it works as well. I think there’s a lot of, other conversations happening with return to office whether people have leases or, some jobs just can’t be done remotely.
So there, there are a lot of variables here. And unfortunately with remote work. There are blurred boundaries. So it does really require us to have clear policies to prevent all the things we’re talking about. Burnout or understanding expectations. Some of the things that we’re seeing and there’s lots of studies that have been out including the big one from Stanford that showed that there is more productivity from folks that are working remotely.
But when we have a hybrid situation that’s where it gets the most tricky, I think, because we have people in the office and we have people remote and then understanding what the policy is to have people in the office are they coming in the office and are they there when other people are there?
So that there is that actual, communication with folks. You’re engaging with other folks on the team. I’ve experienced some hybrid situations where. Folks are required to come to the office three days a week, but it doesn’t matter which days of the week those are. So some people come in on Monday, there’s no one there except them.
It defeats the purpose to me to be in the office by yourself. Setting the time and, and policy of when people should be in the office, I think is critical for that type of hybrid situation. But beyond that, like just getting into the remote situation. I know some businesses or some business owners are worried that the remote option could cause havoc, could wreck their processes, could impact their clients.
And what we’ve been successful at so far is helping businesses see that you don’t have to go all in at once. We can set up guardrails to be able to mitigate risks and, issues that could come up with that remote workforce. Setting up predictable check-ins with all of your folks really sets the foundation for making sure that it is successful.
Some of the guardrails that we’ve implemented are, having core work hours. I think a model that works really well is, everyone is available 10am to 3pm. That way you can be flexible before that and after that, but 10am to 3pm, everyone is able to communicate with you, get what they need.
Or you’re available online for any questions or comments depending on what type of business you have. Certainly setting location guidelines is very important. I think at the beginning of Covid it wasn’t so much an issue because people couldn’t travel, but as soon as travel started, again, we saw people being digital nomads, which I think is great, but it does put a lot of compliance risk with the businesses.
If you have an employee who typically is living in Colorado and you have your taxes and everything set up in Colorado, but then you find out they’ve been working in Mexico for the last six months, you’re opening yourself up to all kinds of compliance risk. Same would go for if they were just in a different state.
You don’t have the tax liability set up in those states and that could come back on you and have severe penalties and fines. Beyond that though what really helps, and I think Enzo, you were fantastic at this, is really setting up the appropriate cybersecurity policies and standards. So having a VPN so that we could work from different locations when wifi maybe is sketchy like the airport or a coffee shop.
And then just making sure we have company approved hardware and software that we are maintaining and tracking. We just really put that peace of mind that everything is protected wherever these folks may be working from. And all of that together leads to a successful remote team. And I think that anyone can implement this should they have a work environment that allows for remote work.
Again, like I said, sometimes there are jobs that we can’t do remotely. And then on the flip side of that, we do have folks that just don’t work well remotely. So I think businesses really do have to be flexible in order to maintain the talent that they have. Unless we’re a situation like we are where we’re a hundred percent remote, then I think you can, mitigate that upfront with people.
They’re not going to join a workforce that is a hundred percent remote if they’re not comfortable working remotely. But if you’re changing to remote, that’s where you really have to have that flexibility because people need to be able to feel comfortable with where they’re working.
Enzo: I would agree that not everybody is cut out for remote work.
And even people who have joined us previously on the team, have realized later down the road that it just wasn’t for them. And that’s okay. Not everybody has to be a remote worker. I like working from home, meaning from my home. I am a homebody. I like mentioned gardening before the webinar.
That’s what I wanna do most of the time. And I don’t wanna live in Italy, even though maybe the wine sounds pretty good. It’s my favorite kind of wine. But, I’d rather just work from home next to my dog. And I hear this argument sometimes, remote workers are in their pajamas and they’re less productive and they’re just, watching cartoons all day.
I know that they’re definitely wrong because there have been studies about this, and I’ll be sharing the study in a follow up blog, so to make sure to watch out for that. But if you’re interested, in the meantime, there’s a company called Ctrip, which is a Chinese company.
The study was done many years ago, but even before Zoom, which is wild. But they tested remote work on half of their team, and they found that people were far more productive. The clients were happier, employees were happier. And this is a study done by Stanford, so it’s legitimate. So I think that it’s important to recognize that.
Maybe not every business can be a hundred percent remote. But being able to offer that when you’re ready is great. It’s a great way to attract talent as well. We have people who come to us specifically to work for us because of the way that we work. And Dan mentioned security.
That is a huge deal for me, especially because we work with confidential client information. So we do have a VPN that has a static IP address so that we don’t get locked out of client’s accounts. And we can also see, when people are logging into it. So we know if people are traveling, but we require that.
And to go one neurotic step further, we also have a company that we work with that sends phishing tests out to our team. So not necessarily related to remote work, but maybe if you are worried about your team using your computers and downloading a virus or something something terrible.
Having those tests ahead of time that prepare people to be aware of, phishing scams or other types of scams, it definitely prevents future problems because we’re all engaging in conversation about that. Like, Can you believe this? Enzo asked me to cut them a check for a million dollars today.
Can you believe that? Of course, it didn’t happen. It’s a scammer. But having those things in place ahead of time, I think just, it keeps the security levels really high. It keeps people on their toes. I don’t know. Dan, have I asked you to cut me a million dollar check yet?
Dan: No, I haven’t received a text from you for a while saying to change your payroll.
But I’m sure it’s fine.
Enzo: Yeah exactly. You talked about legal compliance especially during covid, they were working from home, then things open up and now they’re working elsewhere. What are some of the rules, if somebody works somewhere else, like 50% of the time, 20% of the time, what sort of things should we be paying attention to if we begin to offer remote work for our team?
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. So to highlight that point, so that’s the biggest issue is the tax and payroll compliance. So anytime you have an individual more than 50% of the time in a location, that’s considered their work location. So if you have them set up in Colorado, but then all of a sudden we see that for the last seven months they’ve been working in California.
Technically we should have California as their work address or their home address and be paying those taxes. So those are the liabilities that can have huge risks by not being compliant but other risks that are associated with that. Especially when you have folks that are working remotely wage and hour concerns.
So if we have hourly employees, if we’re not tracking their time appropriately, if we don’t have the time tracking in Gusto, which I highly encourage our clients to do as well. If we don’t have that and their hourly and they’re not tracking all of their time, we could potentially be opening ourselves up to unpaid overtime claims, other risks that are associated with that.
And all of those can come with heavy fines and heavy penalties. And then everything we just talked about, the working remotely, the data security privacy regulations, those will continue to grow and evolve as we continue to grow as a country and being in this virtual environment in a global scale.
So we really need to be focused on those and making sure that we’re compliant just across the board. And setting our best practice really just sets the tone for that right from the beginning.
Enzo: So interesting thought. If somebody is working in Colorado and they move to California more than 50% of the time and now they have, to deal with California taxes, you also have to think about overtime rules.
They’re different in Colorado than they are in California. They’re even different in certain cities in California. And now you have other rules like when to issue last paychecks. I made a huge mistake whenever I was first getting started. I didn’t realize that you had to pay somebody in California out immediately and we waited until the next pay cycle and we had to pay the employee a per day penalty. ‘Because I didn’t know about this and it was just an accident that we covered because we made the mistake. But you don’t think about those sort of things when somebody says, I’m in California. You say, have fun surfing. They have a good time with the sun. It’s cold here. But there’s all this other sort of stuff.
And then even beyond that. You might even create sales tax nexus, which means that you’ve gotta be compliant if you’ve got taxable sales even further. So that’s why we have our SALT team that investigates those sort of things. It feels like things can spin outta control pretty quickly if you’re not paying attention to putting those guardrails in place and understanding where people are going and what that means.
Having you really help because it lifts, the burden off of my shoulders. ’cause I feel like I could never wrap my head around it.
Dan: Definitely. And and they’re always evolving too, so we have to be on top of it.
Enzo: Exactly. So we have just under 10 minutes left and I know we have a few questions from the audience.
I also have a couple other questions for you, Dan. I feel like I could talk to you about this forever, but I know that a lot of people here are trying to sort out, what do I need to be paying attention to? Or what should I be focusing on? What should I prioritize? Because it’s, there’s so many things that we listed.
If a small business owner could focus on fixing just one issue we’ve discussed today, what should they prioritize above everything else?
Dan: Wow, that’s hard. Just one. My number one would be preventing employee turnover. Losing great people, losing talent. That’s your most expensive mistake that you’re gonna make.
And when we’re talking about turnover, in my mind, it’s typically caused by poor people management, unclear expectations or just having compliance issues. And I think all of that not to speak highly of myself, but having a dedicated HR person to be able to focus on that and help with that people management aspect of it, can really mitigate that turnover substantially.
Enzo: Amazing. I, yeah, turnover is rough. And by the way, audience members, if you have any questions, please throw them in the webinar chat. We’ll make sure to get to them. Gosh, there’s one other question that’s the top of mind, really just around like our benefits to go back to that I feel like we have to compete a lot with larger companies.
Even tech companies are stealing away accountants. It’d be great for us to be a tech company, but we’re a professional services firm that works remotely and we’re a bit more tech forward than other businesses, but we’re not a big SaaS company. What non monetary benefits can we offer?
You talked about a good company culture. We can’t have ping pong tables. Unless I’m playing by myself, I maybe give my dog a paddle. But anything like to compete with the big dogs?
Dan: First off, and I know we’re running short on time, I had a ping pong table next to one of my cubicles once, and it was the worst thing that I ever had in my life.
So I don’t encourage that it was so loud. I. And I don’t wanna take the fun away from people, but it was just very disruptive. I think so I’m just gonna highlight those again. I think the company culture is going to attract the most the most people. If you have a good place to work, if you have the flexible environment, you’re providing opportunities for people to grow within their career, their skillsets those go way beyond just a high salary or a coffee bar or something like that.
I think a majority of the younger generations that are coming into the workforce are looking at these opportunities to be able to be free and flexible and continue to learn and really be on their own schedule. Versus a very structured butts in seats nine to five. You have free coffee, free snacks that doesn’t sell folks anymore.
You really do need to be able to have, what we’re talking about now flexibility the opportunity for these benefits that can support offsetting some of the health benefits. Things like that all beyond just a fancy title or a large salary, which are fantastic and I know a lot of people are looking for that, but there’s so much more that encompasses really enjoying work and really retaining that top talent.
Enzo: So you did have a question that actually directly relates to expectations of younger folks. So how do expectations differ between Gen Z, millennials and older workers in terms of flexibility and benefits?
Dan: I think that is very subjective, first off. And it doesn’t just necessarily enter into a generational thing.
But what I’m seeing is the younger generation, they really like the flexibility more than any others. I think us elder millennials, we do like it as well. And like you said we’re becoming more accustomed to this remote work environment, which really does well for us. But I think the younger folks want the flexibility to be able to travel, to be able to do valuable work and to see things that they’re working on actually impact the business.
And maybe, generations higher than us. I think they’re looking for more security more than anything. As things continue to, evolve and AI starts to come in more and more. I think a lot of the older generations really just want that secured workforce where they can continue to do what they do best in providing their skillset and their expertise and hopefully actually adding a lot of value to the younger generations coming into the workforce.
Enzo: So you mentioned AI. I won’t dive into that right now, but I think that’s a great topic for us to discuss in the future, and we only have a few moments left. I’d like to ask you, do you have any final piece of advice you wanna share to small business owners who want to build resilient and engage teams?
Dan: Yeah, thank you. So HR, in my mind, it’s not a cost center, it’s a profit protector. Employee turnover is expensive. It’s so much cheaper to fix problems than to replace employees, and having proactive people management really drives business success. Small changes in HR policies that we’re talking about can create massive long-term gains and really retain all of your top employees.
Enzo: That’s awesome. Thank you so much Dan. So we are at the end of our talk, and like I said, I wish we could just keep this going ’cause we could talk forever. But that brings us to the end of our webinar today. And I wanna sincerely thank you, Dan, for sharing such practical insights and thank all of our participants for being here as well, for offering excellent questions.
As a reminder, we’ll be sending out this recording of the session to all of the registered participants so you can revisit it and feel free to share it with your friends, your colleagues. And as a bonus, we’ll be sending out an HR guide that I think everybody will find interesting.
And if you had any additional questions we didn’t get to today, or if you wanna continue the conversation, please connect with us on LinkedIn. Both Dan and I would be very happy to keep the discussion going. As you could tell, be passionate about this topic and we both find it incredibly interesting.
So thank you again for investing your time with us today. We wish you all the success uh, 2025 in building an engaged and resilient team and we hope to see you again soon. See you later!
