How To Help Your Clients (and You) Retain Employees

It's no surprise that talent recruitment and retention is the top challenge for almost every business in 2023, and it appears that it will continue to be in the foreseeable future. Low unemployment, an aging workforce, remote work, and changing employee expectations are just a few of the variables and challenges your firm and your clients are facing. 

With the cards seemingly stacked against employers, how can your small-to-medium-sized (SMB) business clients—as well as your own accounting firm—retain employees and stay competitive in this challenging market? We have a few suggestions.

Retaining Employees in 5 Simple Steps

The following initiatives are options you can advise your clients—not to mention yourself—to try as ways to promote a satisfied and productive workforce.

1. Offer Remote Work 

While many large employers continue to change their remote work policies and call employees back to the office (43%, according to ZipRecruiter), it’s to your and your clients’ benefit to offer remote work opportunities. For example, having a hybrid option—a few days in the office, and a few days remote—is a work environment that’s attractive to today’s workers.

The fact is, remote work continues to be an expectation and desire amongst a large amount of the workforce. ZipRecruiter reports that, on average, employers who post remote jobs receive more than three times as many applications as in-person jobs. Not offering remote work puts you and your clients at a competitive disadvantage. 

Remote work also gives you access to a pool of talent, such as working moms or military spouses that are unable to come into an office 40+ hours a week. And it opens up the geographical boundaries for your firm and clients to hire talent from across the country. 

If you decide to implement a remote or hybrid work environment, it’s important that you don’t forget to update your employee manuals, laying out clear expectations regarding remote work and how employees can be successful. Additionally, because managing time and payroll with remote employees can be challenging, implementing effective accounting tools—like QuickBooks Online Payroll with its flexible accounting mapping, simplified payroll time management, and easy management of employee documents and records—can help.

2. Minimize Health Insurance Costs

Health insurance and medical care continues to be one of the largest expenses your employees will spend out of their own pocket, but all increases are felt at both the employer and employee level. Here are a few ways you can help mitigate these rising costs:

• Work directly with your insurance broker to see what plan options allow you to minimize total medical insurance costs each year. 
• Clearly lay out to employees any cost increases they will have to carry and if you have a plan to share in the cost. 
• Ensure your broker clearly communicates with employees any health and medical information and changes. Employees appreciate transparency, finding it almost as important as the message.

Keep in mind, most employers underutilize the services included with their health insurance broker. You can get your broker involved in year-end staff meetings or HR updates and also ask your broker for best practices on renewal communication. 

3. Simplify the Benefits Renewal Process

You and your clients can make the benefits renewal process easier by introducing tools that can automate and simplify any manual and tedious process. Can employees auto renew their benefits online? Can they update their federal and state withholding allowances in real time? 

QuickBooks Online Payroll makes the process easy and allows you to focus on more important communication instead of tedious renewal forms. 

The benefits renewal period also gives you the opportunity to communicate a variety of important company information as well as the opportunity to introduce other benefits, like 401k plans, EAP benefits, and even access to free or low-cost opt-in benefits (e.g., additional life insurance or pet insurance). 

4. Listen to Your Employees

It’s never too late for you and your clients to listen to your employees. With open enrollment season at the end of the year, you have a great opportunity to find out what they’re thinking by sending out an employee survey on what employees liked and disliked about the company benefit plans for the past year. Their feedback can help inform benefit updates for the new year. 

Do clients want group access to pet benefits? Do they hope for a better understanding of services under their EAP plan? These are all areas that can be learned through an employee survey or open feedback from everyone. Plus, you may find an employee who has some innovative benefit ideas that they can help implement and possibly own, relieving the pressure HR may feel to have to be in charge of all new benefits initiatives.

5. Make the Holidays Less Stressful, Increase Productivity

The holidays can be a stressful period for many employees, especially if their company relies on Q4 sales to make up the majority of revenue for the year. Add in hosting family and relatives, buying year-end gifts, remembering lost loved ones, and being reminded of financial challenges, and the stress of the holiday season is real. 

As an employer, how can you and your clients help your employees juggle all of these stressors but also end the year strong in their role? Offering flexible schedules and coverage days, including overtime, can incentivize employees to keep their performance strong as they end the year. Acknowledging the diversity of holidays that your employees celebrate will help everyone feel accepted and appreciated. Writing personalized year-end thank you notes to each team member will show how much you care and appreciate them. And you may also consider talking to your benefits broker about changing the renewal period to a different time of year so that renewal does not happen during one of the most stressful times of year.

Ultimately, remembering that your team has more on their mind than just work during this time of year will help you set realistic work expectations for them and for yourself. 

Successful Employee Retainment Strategies = Successful Business 

By offering remote work, minimizing health costs, making the benefits renewal process easier, understanding your employees’ needs, and showing year-end appreciation, you and your clients are doing the right things to retain employees. By retaining strong, productive employees, you’re setting your business up for success, and the QuickBooks family and our value-filled accounting solutions are here to support you every step of the way.

"This is a paid partnership with Intuit."