White collar work is also more likely to lead to burn-out and mental health disability, which leads to longer and more expensive claims than many physical injuries. 

Let’s be real: Insurance isn’t there to protect you. It's is a financial product made to maximize shareholder value.

Did you know that your spouse needs to sign off if you designate anyone else as your life insurance beneficiary? Because if you croak, life insurance doesn’t want to get in the middle of your family drama. 

Since employer group plans need to offer the same coverage to everyone, employer-sponsored plans are sometimes the only way that people with serious or chronic health conditions can get any disability or life insurance at all. 

To state the obvious: When you mess with people’s rights, sh*t gets real. And there are IRL consequences when you get the balance wrong.

Most states have regulations that fall into a few easy categories: Do you protect 12 weeks of leave, even if the company isn’t covered by FMLA? Do you have a state-paid program?

Every law tells a story. Something happened to make the legislature need to put a law in writing. This labor poster from Georgia is no exception. And the story it tells is pretty grim.

Managing all of this takes time and brain power. You’re contacting the employee, looking up policy details, doing unconfident math, and trying to figure out payroll work-arounds. The lost productivity cancels out the amount you’re saving by relying on these outside subsidies. Meanwhile, the new parent thinks it’s all your fault and blames you for the terrible experience you’re putting them through.

I get that it’s expensive to pay someone not to work for several months, but there are strong business reasons why you should do it anyway. 

The game begins. You have one calendar year to spend the money. The company has a year to collect it back from you. If you both follow the plan, you’ll both walk away scot-free, with the taxes you didn’t spend still in your pocket.

Maybe you’ve had this experience: You’re in crisis. You can’t work, so you call in. A well-meaning person you hardly know sends you information about the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). You look into what it covers and wonder how this could possibly help. The minimum CYA measure to guard against the wild things that people in crisis do.

A hundred years ago, in the heyday of unions, non-unionized businesses needed a way to make their low wages, long shifts, and poor working conditions look a little more attractive. So they did what lazy corporate wonks have done to increase morale since the beginning of time: They threw a pizza party. 

When someone is paid for a day they didn't work, it MUST be entered into payroll as some kind of Paid Time Off type. Otherwise, there's no way to pay it. Most of the uncommon leave types don't allow negative balances in payroll systems. So if your time off isn't allocated to another bucket, it can't get paid. The discrepancy could even block payroll and prevent everyone from getting paid.

What if, instead of inflating wages with cash, the company offered to pay for something even more valuable than cash? The health of workers and their families. 

Did you know that if your company has more than 50 employees (100 in CA, CO, NY, and VT), the employer sees all the prescriptions people take?  They don’t know who, but if there are fewer than 100 people it’s pretty easy to guess who needed a prescription to control their excessive underarm sweating. Or who's on Lithium.

Hourly workers often accrue time off based on the time actually worked, which may or may not be under their control.

The many layers of humans and technology that go into insurance deductions can make it hard to track down where the problem is. And because of the old school systems insurance companies still use, it can be like traveling back in time. 

Nearly everything that happens in the company goes through payroll. And the person managing it needs to have the skills of an accountant, IT, lawyer, insurance agent, and operations manager, all rolled into one.

For years, health insurance costs have already been increasing at more than double the rate of inflation. But even factoring in that trend, next year’s numbers seem like a prank. 

Both of these tools are available to companies for less than a dollar per employee per month. They can transform someone’s exit from cold paperwork to meaningful support.  If it rips your heart out to see what’s happening in the job market, Callings and Kept are two things you can offer right now that make a real difference.