Core Benefits
HUB’s Employee Benefits Consultants are licensed and trained to assemble and aggregate competitive and compliant core benefits programs for employers of most any size. As the fifth largest broker in the world, we work with virtually every insurance provider in the country, offering our clients an expansive list of core benefit provider options.
What Are Core Benefits?
Core employee benefits are essential offerings that provide foundational support to employees, typically forming the backbone of any total rewards package. Some of these benefits are often mandatory and are designed to ensure the well-being and security of employees.
Examples include health insurance, which covers medical expenses for employees and their families, and retirement plans such as 401(k) accounts that help employees save for their future. Additionally, paid time off (PTO), including vacation days and sick leave, allows employees to recharge and manage their health without financial strain.
By providing core benefits, employers demonstrate their commitment to their employees’ overall health and financial stability, fostering a positive workplace culture.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about core benefit options?
Voluntary / Supplemental Benefits
As the fifth largest broker in the world, HUB works with virtually every major worksite, voluntary, and supplemental insurance provider in the country, offering our clients an expansive list of voluntary benefit options.
What Are Voluntary / Supplemental Benefits?
Traditional core benefits packages, while foundational, often leave gaps in coverage that can expose employees to financial risk. Voluntary or supplemental benefits offer essential protections that bridge these gaps, allowing employees to select coverage that aligns with their personal needs and circumstances.
These benefits are sometimes fully paid for, or partially subsidized by the employer, though oftentimes they are paid for entirely by the employee through payroll deductions, making them an affordable option for enhancing overall protection.
Examples include critical illness insurance, which provides a lump-sum payment upon diagnosis of a serious illness, and accident insurance, which helps cover unexpected medical expenses resulting from injuries.
Other common voluntary benefits include dental, vision, short-term disability insurance, long-term liability, and life insurance. HUB offers hundreds of voluntary / supplemental products and services for clients to choose from.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our voluntary / supplemental benefit options?
Non-Traditional Benefits
Non-traditional employee benefits are innovative perks that go beyond standard offerings, aimed at enhancing employee satisfaction, engagement, and well-being. These benefits often focus on promoting work-life balance and addressing the diverse needs of a modern workforce. With five generations now in the workforce, these benefits are growing in popularity.
Examples include flexible work arrangements, such as remote work options and flexible hours, which allow employees to manage their time more effectively. Wellness programs, including mental health resources and fitness incentives, are also popular, helping to promote overall health and reduce stress.
Additionally, benefits like student loan repayment assistance and financial wellness programs can help employees manage their finances and improve their overall quality of life. Furthermore, a benefit like tuition assistance supports continuous learning and development, while pet insurance recognizes the important role pets play in many employees’ lives.
HUB offers hundreds of non-traditional products for clients to choose from.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our non-traditional benefit options?
Discounts & Perks
Employee perks and discount programs help deepen workforce loyalty by providing personal savings, local connections, and meaningful family experiences for your people. And, when times get tough, and performance incentives and raises are difficult to come by, perks become an even more valuable workplace benefit.
With savings across more than 10,000 cities and 300,000 partner brands, HUB’s fully customizable employee discounts and perks marketplace allows employers to provide employees with deals, discounts, and exclusive offers across travel, dining, shopping, theater, concerts, amusement parks, and more.
From Disney and Universal Studios to Apple, Costco, and Carnival Cruise Lines, HUB has partnered with over 1,000 national providers and hundreds of thousands of regional and local merchants.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our discounts and perks program?
Executive Benefits
Top leaders expect an executive benefits package that goes beyond salary and bonus potential. Executive benefits offer added incentives, resources, and protection for your C-suite. They also reward achievement and ambition by providing unique benefits that acknowledge the contributions of your executive team.
Executive benefits aren’t just a luxury, but rather are often necessary. Core benefits, for example, may not provide adequate coverage because they are capped, taxable, or exclude bonuses or commissions. This can leave your leaders with a significant shortfall as they move into retirement.
When you offer executive benefits to suit individual needs, you round out your total benefits offering. By providing a meaningful, personalized incentive package, you create an environment that attracts high-performing individuals and motivates them to remain with your organization.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our executive benefits programs?
Retirement Services
Designed to help businesses navigate the complex landscape of employee retirement benefits, HUB’s retirement services go beyond simply selecting retirement plans.
Our full-service approach ensures that your retirement plan aligns with your company’s goals, complies with regulations, and empowers your employees to secure their financial futures.
Our retirement services span the following:
- 401(k) / 403k(b) / 457(b) / 401(a)
- Pension Plans
- SEP IRAs and SIMPLE IRAs
- Profit Sharing
- Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP)
- Cash Balance Plans
- FICA Alternative Plans (3121)
- Investment Consulting & Oversight
- Risk Mitigation
- Governance & Compliance
- Employee Education
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our retirement programs and services?
HSAs, HRAs, FSAs, and ICHRAs
HUB offers several tax-advantaged savings plans and spending account options to help employees maximize pre-tax dollars set aside for qualified medical expenses and dependent care expenses. These include:
- Healthcare Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
- Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (DCFSA)
- Limited Purposed Flexible Spending Accounts (LPFSA)
- Health Savings Accounts (HAS)
- Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRA)
Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRA)
Each plan type has different rules governing contribution limits, forfeitures, roll-overs, run-out periods, and portability. Some even allow for eventual conversion into retirement savings.
By leveraging the tax advantages, long-term savings potential, investment opportunities, and flexibility in covering healthcare expenses, these savings plans help your employees plan for future healthcare expenses and bridge the retirement healthcare savings gap as people continue to live longer and healthcare costs rise.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about tax-advantaged savings plan options?
Strategic Planning
The average premium for health insurance has risen 54% over the last decade. And with employee benefits now quite often the third or fourth largest line item on an organization’s P&L, employers know that endless premium hikes are unsustainable.
Novel strategies are necessary to make employee benefits plan benefits more affordable while remaining effective. That’s where HUB’s approach to strategic planning comes in. Our three-prong approach allows employers to build a tailored plan that enhances both the employee and employer experience.
- Quality Employee eXperiences (QEX) – Our employee-centric approach to designing and delivering cost-efficient benefits programs that support employees from onboarding through retirement.
- Workforce Personal Analysis – Our data-driven approach to tailoring benefits, policies, services, and products to the needs of a diverse workforce while also supporting client business goals and workforce productivity.
- QEX Benefits SmartView – Our benchmarking process that goes beyond traditional plan design levers (e.g. premiums, deductibles, copays) to examine key indicators that other benchmarking tools overlook.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our strategic-approach to employee benefits?
Actuarial and Financial Planning
HUB’s financial consulting practice helps our clients make data-driven decisions about their health and welfare plans. Our analysts and actuaries have a deep level of expertise in group benefits, including renewals, plan design, benchmarking, and market searches.
Of note is HUB’s Infused Analytics (HIA), a suite of tools that provide an integrated approach to analyzing medical and pharmacy claims. It includes analytics, informatics, clinical support, and financial reporting that provide deep insights into plan strategy and design.
The HIA platform empowers our clients with data to improve plan operation, plan performance, best care outcomes, and targeted solution integration. This helps to maximize population health and workforce productivity.
Our scientific approach helps employers; discover the right questions, describe better answers, identify predictive drivers, and prescribe impactful outcomes. With HUB, you’ll be confident that your rates and coverages have been properly analyzed and that you’re offering the best employee coverage at affordable rates.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our actuarial and financial services?
Compliance & Legal
HUB’s compliance practice works with employers to minimize exposure to audits, penalties, and lawsuits that may arise from noncompliance with state and federal laws applicable to employee benefits plan sponsors.
Our attorneys are nationally recognized experts in ACA, HIPAA, COBRA, DOL, Code Section 125, HDHPs, HSAs, HRAs, FSAs, DCAP plans, FMLA, USERRA, Mental Health and Substance Abuse Parity, CHIPRA, the Public Health Service Act, and Medicare Secondary Payer rules.
We offer a full complement of compliance services, including timely legal updates and guidance as regulations are issued. We also assist with document preparation and review, including SPD wrap documents; Form 5500s, and Summary Annual Reports (SARs),
Our Compliance practice also provides day-to-day guidance concerning the full range of employee benefits challenges to help ensure that leaves of absence, changes in status, hiring and terminations, or restructuring decisions do not compromise your benefits compliance.
HUB’s compliance services are strategic, varied, and practical. Our service is designed with the goal of taking you to the point of solution, rather than simply telling you what the law says.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our compliance services?
Self-Funding
Self-funded employers essentially serve as their own insurance companies, backing claims with reserves and stop-loss insurance. While often mischaracterized as a funding strategy only designed for large companies, self-funding remains increasingly attractive and attainable for much smaller organizations.
While there are several advantages to self-funding, whether self-funding is right for any particular employer comes down a variety of factors, not the least of which is temperament and appetite for risk vs. reward.
At HUB, we guide our clients through this process from start to finish. From exploring an organization’s appetite for risk and learning how they can be offset to understanding the administrative responsibilities and developing predictive claims scenarios, we guide our clients all along the way.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about self funding?
Stop-loss Insurance
It’s not uncommon for employer-sponsored group health plans to experience individual medical or pharmacy claims of $500,000 or more. Self-funded (or self-insured) employers, in particular, need to actively guard against such claims with stop-loss insurance.
Stop-loss insurance is a type of policy that protects self-insured employers from catastrophic claims that exceed predetermined levels. If total claims exceed the limit, the stop-loss insurer either covers the claim or reimburses the employer.
Employers moving toward self-insurance for healthcare should ensure their broker can manage the complexities of stop-loss insurance. A HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant can help iron-out the particulars, including the appropriate aggregate and specific stop loss limits, plan mirroring, lasers, and rate caps.
We can also help determine a health plan’s cost pressure points and help determine how to first manage those costs at the plan level before seeking stop-loss coverage, which might otherwise be unaffordable or unattainable.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about stop-loss insurance?
Employee Communications
HUB’s Communication and Design practice focuses on helping clients engage with employees using intentional, well-designed benefits communication strategies, messaging, and marketing materials that span print, digital, and mobile forms of communication.
By providing clear guidance on benefits enrollment and facilitating transparency and open communication, your employees are better able to understand the advantages and opportunities available through your benefits plan.
This reinforces the value of your benefits investment and yields more informed benefit decisions which empower employees, strengthening their relationship with their organization.
Our communication and design services go far beyond benefits enrollment, and include;
- Wellness communications
- Change management communications
- HR policy communications
- Total rewards statements
- Perks and discount programs
- Event promotion
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our communication and design services?
Pharmacy Consulting
HUB’s Pharmacy Consulting practice provides vendor-agnostic, client-centric pharmacy solutions. Our Pharmacy Regional Practice Leaders develop best-fit solutions using Empower for an at-a-glance block pricing as well as the RFP process.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our pharmacy consulting services?
HR Technology and Benefits Administration
HR and benefits administration technology solutions can help you simplify and streamline burdensome and complex administrative functions. This can help you keep your staff happy, improve your retention and recruitment, and enhance your business operations from the file room or factory floor to the C-Suite.
We are vendor-agnostic in our approach, which includes researching, purchasing, implementation, optimizing, and management of HR technologies. With so many platforms and solutions to choose from, we help our clients find the right system to fit their needs, budget, and workplace culture.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our HR technology and benefits administration services?
Workplace Health, Wellness, and Performance
Employers universally want to keep workforces healthy and productive. Data-driven health and wellness programs built on industry best practices can yield positive results. They can encourage engagement and motivate employees to make healthy lifestyle changes so that everyone on the team is fit and focused.
HUB works with our clients to create multi-year workplace health, wellness, and performance strategies that satisfy the unique needs of an organization through strategic guidance, effective program design, and rollout assistance.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our workplace health, wellness, and performance expertise?
Workforce Absence Management
HUB’s’ Workforce Absence Management practice works with our clients to build effective absence management programs to address absences that are both planned and unplanned.
We help our clients reduce workplace injuries and eliminate patterns and practices that introduce or exacerbate chronic conditions. We do this through integrated absence management programs, aligned paid/unpaid time-off programs, enhanced benefits packages, and robust return-to-work policies. This results in healthier employees, increased productivity, and profitability protection.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our workplace absence management services?
Global Benefits
HUB’s Global Benefits practice works with multi-national clients to develop proactive, tailor-made strategies to ensure they overcome international HR challenges and enhance their global capabilities.
Our Global Benefits services include global brokerage oversight and local benefits placement in over 100 countries, HR consulting services for foreign nationals and expatriates, a benefit program for international transfers, multinational pooling analysis, and captives management, rewards benchmarking and analysis, Inventory of benefits and other HR programs and assistance with new country startups.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our global benefits consulting services?
HR Resource Consulting
Our HR Resource Consulting practices operate as an extension of an employer’s Human Resources team. Our HR assessment and consultation ensures that our clients get the most from their people, processes, and technology, thereby harnessing the power of the workforce.
Want to speak to a HUB Southwest Employee Benefits Consultant to learn more about our HR resource consulting services?
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