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. 

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. 

Short term disability insurance (STD) isn’t sexy. It doesn't attract top talent, but it can keep a company from the kind of tough decisions that can end with lawyers. Many employers don’t even know that the situations that are draining their budget are insurable. 

Is it okay for an hourly employee to work 30 hrs/week (instead of 40) for 3 weeks due to illness without taking intermittent FMLA? Their manager is cool with it and the employee doesn't want to take PTO.

He was quite confident that people always know when their paycheck is wrong. I wish that were always true. Payroll is complex, and you don’t know what you don’t know. I see a ton of these kinds of silent errors with 401(k)s. 

Employers have discretion about what's covered in their HRA plan, which is what makes them so useful. The company decides the annual limit, as well as specifications like whether to cover deductible expenses, post-deductible expenses, and/or over-the-counter expenses and services.

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. 

If you think that looking up worker’s comp codes is boring, you’re missing out. If you give me a list of thousands of obscure jobs, I’m going to lose at least 20 minutes going through it. 

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. 

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.