Fall News: Maximize your pre-tax dollars and other tips from Parsley
Are you ready for open enrollment?
Soon it will be time to air out the camping gear before putting it away, and then hit the ground running to secure the workflows for Open-enrollment Season! If you’re not excited, it’s because you don’t yet see that RIGHT NOW is the moment of golden opportunity to make changes that will increase employee engagement, support employee financial well-being, and make the most of your company’s pre-tax dollars in 2025. At Parsley, we are very excited about right now.
Because, right now, we are:
- Helping Larger Employers improve benefit enrollment messaging to ensure employees on the cusp of losing Medicaid eligibility, don’t miss their deadlines to enroll in employer healthcare, preventing costly financial setbacks.
- Helping Mom and Pop Shops, who can’t afford comprehensive benefits, to create customized 2025 benefit packages that maximize pre-tax dollars, protect employees' existing public benefits and tax-credits, and reduce their out-of-pocket expenses.
- Helping HR Leaders analyze established career pathways to find and address Benefits Cliffs that are creating unintended roadblocks to diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
And we’d like to help you too. Read on and schedule a time to connect to learn more.
10 indicators that Benefits Cliffs may be hurting retention and productivity
Benefits Cliffs occur when an increase in wages, or a change to employer benefits available to them, causes an employee to lose net income. This happens if a person loses eligibility for a public assistance benefit, like Medicaid or Child Care Tuition Assistance, but their increase in wages does not cover the resulting increased expenses. This makes a raise function more like a pay cut.
HR professionals often ask us:
“How would I know if someone is facing a Benefits Cliff? We don’t have access to that kind of information about them, and it’s inappropriate to ask if they are using public assistance.”
We also hear from some HR leaders that though they don't think that Benefits Cliffs are the reason employees are quitting, they acknowledge that they wouldn’t know if it was, since it’s not the kind of question that comes up in an exit interview, if one is offered...
Unlocking the Full Potential of Compensation Strategy with Best-fit Benefits
We understand the tightrope you walk every day. Balancing budgets while ensuring our employees are taken care of is not just challenging employee benefit leaders, it is the Challenge.
A socially responsible company invests time and energy into ensuring these two objectives work in tandem, rather than work against each one another. But at the end of the day, even with a mountain of KPIs and financial data, it’s still sometimes hard to prove that our efforts on both fronts are aligned and achieving their objectives. What if you could identify, with confidence, which strategies improve the company’s bottom line and the lives of your employees?
At Parsley, we believe it is possible to see where these goals align best by braiding insights on employer benefits with public assistance expertise to understand their combined impact on employees' financial realities. This allows you to:
- Identify areas where compensation adjustments will have the most impact
- Predict the outcomes of various compensation strategies on employees
- Align your compensation strategy with both employee needs and company goals
Without understanding what triggers an employee's loss of Medicaid, or what paying for child care looks like through the stages of an apprenticeship, you're only seeing part of the picture. That's why we've invested so much time and energy into building our platform that allows us to gain insight into the unique needs of entry-level workers who are navigating both employer benefits and public assistance programs.
By turning that insight into actionable solutions that save employees and your company money, you can unlock the the full potential of your compensation strategy, creating a multiplier effect that benefits both employers and employees.
Need to see it to believe it?
The Garnish - A Sprig of Fun!
We recently had a chance to chat with Ms. Niki, the host of "Her Infinite Variety" on WORT-FM. We sprinkled in some HR wisdom, tossed around ideas about employee benefits, and shared the origin story of how Parsley sprouted into existence. It was a recipe for a great conversation!
If you are a woman in the Madison, Wisconsin area cooking up something awesome, she may want to add you to her menu of amazing guests.
Mapping out Realistic Futures with Jobseekers
We continue our partnerships with several nonprofits, making Parsley available to vocational trainees and job-seekers. sometimes with a specific employer’s starting wages and benefits package in mind, and sometimes with a hypothetical job, users model scenarios to determine the hours and pay they will need to cover expenses as they transition away from public assistance.
While every session promises sobering confirmations of the soaring costs of housing and child care, Parsley users are consistently reporting that even so, they feel empowered by the ability to model their true income and expenses, with wages, taxes, other deductions, and public assistance all in one place. This gives them the information they need to make plans and prioritize next steps. One user told us:
“This is the most helpful thing I’ve done, in all of these [training programs and social service support engagements], I’ve never been able to map it all out like this to see what’s possible. I need to share this with my friends, because people fear what they can’t understand, and people just can’t see the future.”
HR leaders, this is the time to talk (before open enrollment), together, let’s envision great futures for your employees!
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