Let's get one thing straight: It's perfectly fine for your company to reimburse people for having a life. But if there's no business purpose or tax-preferred program for it (like an HRA, commuter benefit, or 401k), it has to be taxed as income.

A PEO is an insurance broker, a guardrail, and a payroll provider. But it’s not a brain. Some people need a PEO. Some need a person. Most don’t know which they are.

What we’re really seeing is misaligned incentives disguised as authority. They have no reason to follow through, just respond. We wouldn’t put up with this in any other business service.

Somewhere between two weeks and thirty years, it has to become something else.

And yet, if 50 of your employees can’t meet at Applebees after work, someone taking leave might not have legal job protection. Even if the work is covered. Even if the team has capacity. Even if the impact is minimal.

Parental leave combines the most complicated parts of HR into one policy: protected classes, disability, paid time off and sick time, obscure payroll esoterica, employees who are "active" but not "working" (and sometimes don't come back when you expect), insurance (policy details, deductions, and a qualifying event), onboarding and offboarding (maybe more than once per person), a bajillionty federal, state, and local laws, many of which conflict

Even the fancy ben admin tools. Somewhere behind the curtain, someone is downloading a form and forwarding it to a carrier. Often using unsecured email.

We knew the compliance risks when we picked the non-Safe Harbor 401k option. We thought we were keeping an eye on it.

"Is this because I said I wasn't pregnant?" He scratched his beard. He was the first non-birth parent to use the policy. And it wasn’t working as planned. And yes, his claim was denied because he wasn't pregnant.

Everywhere I went, I saw the same thing: Employees didn’t understand what they signed up for. Brokers didn’t really understand either. HR didn’t want to touch it. Claims were denied. People thought their plans sucked.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but Qualifying Life Events (QLEs) aren't written in stone.

These problems don’t show up right away. They lie in wait until someone balances the books and notices thousands of dollars missing.

A man claiming to represent the New York Workers' Comp Board had shown up at my client's home in upstate New York, demanding proof of coverage. It would have been laughable, except that it was real.

FMLA doesn't guarantee paid leave, but some states have paid leave programs.

Breaks shorter than 30 minutes aren't required under Federal law. Breaks under 20 must be paid and included in overtime, PTO, and FTE calcul

Running the People side of your business takes a lot of work, but hiring a PEO comes with trade-offs that you may regret later.

Both employers and employees get 1.5x the value of every dollar compensated through a tax-sheltered program that they do through straight co

In this post we’ll discuss how to determine your budget and priorities, what information to look for in plan options, and how to structure a

Offering a commuter benefit to your employees can make a meaningful difference in your team’s quality of life, improve productivity, and pot

Given the significant cost of many COBRA premiums, PeopleOps teams should be prepared to answer departing employees’ questions about COBRA i