In the senior living, skilled nursing, disability services, home care, and hospice industries, partnering with a PEO is common practice, but operators may be unsure of how they can actually benefit you and the day-to-day operations. To help show what a PEO can do for your organization, we brought on Kasey Devine, Vice President of Strategic Growth, to discuss how a PEO can empower your workforce and elevate operations.
What is a PEO?
A PEO is a professional employer organization. That means it’s a business construct that allows organizations to band together to pool their resources – typically with matters related to employees, employee benefits, workers compensation insurance, and really, most importantly, human resources administration.
Why Is It Important for a Senior Living Operator to Partner with a PEO?
There is so much running against operators today. You have the workforce crisis making it harder and harder to staff your buildings. One way or another, at the local, state and federal level – labor laws are changing at a breakneck pace, and the last thing that an operator needs from a labor law or a tax perspective – is a surprise. That’s one side of it. And then the other side is, the fact that margins aren’t huge in senior living. Any way that you can have a more predictable business model that has a little bit wider of a margin because you’re more efficient than the operator down the street. It absolutely makes a ton of sense.
How Does a PEO Help Operators Empower Your Workforce?
Procare HR empowers workforces in a couple of ways. Providing a world class employment experience through benefits and technology, enabling the administrative staff at the employer to focus on proactive projects more which would drive things like recruitment, employee engagement, employee retention, performance reviews, all of those things which make that a better place to work. Also, studies show through NAPEO, which is the governing body of PEOs nationwide, that companies and organizations that use a PEO outpace their competition in terms of revenue and profit by double digit percentage points. In an industry like seniors housing, where margins can be thin, that might be the difference between additional investment in the workforce and cuts. It’s a better experience for the employees. If I’m an employee and I have two different job offers and they’re identical, I probably will end up selecting the employer that works with the PEO.
How Does a PEO Help Leverage Buying Power?
By partnering with Procare HR, an operator experiences the benefits of the PEO going to market and making the best recommendations from an HR administration, a worker’s compensation, and an employee benefits perspective. We are able to leverage the tens of thousands of employees represented at our clients to go to market and put your organization at the best possible light. To be clear, PEOs, especially like Procare HR, aren’t necessarily just a way to get cheap insurance. What that really does is again, feeds in to the employment experience by providing offsets for an investment in your people and an investment in your HR infrastructure.
Shared Liability
From a liability perspective, it’s never been higher for senior living operators than any other business owner. And it comes from a few different places. Number one, your employees can get hurt. In senior living, there’s more activity than a law firm or other business. Inherently there, there’s more opportunity for risk. There’s also just the same amount of risk from an employment law and tax perspective. Now you’re adding on compliance because you’re dealing in the healthcare arena. A PEO like Procare HR shares that liability because we co-employe the employees under our tax identification number. That allows us to both tackle these issues, and that’s on the reactive side. Imagine if you also had the HR resources that were experts that were constantly up to date to tackle those things before they become problems as well, allowing your staff to then go work on the. Oh, I’d really like to do projects. And so that liability is now less because you have a team that’s handling dozens of operators and in 50 states, I can see these things before they’re coming. And when something falls through the cracks, I don’t inherently have the same risk profile that I did before I joined someone like Procare HR.
HR Outsourcing and Resources
As an operator evaluates their portfolio and even each individual community within the portfolio, you have to assume that each community is almost like its own employment group. If you look at it that way, not every operator is fortunate enough to have the exact same labor laws and tax laws, because not everyone is always in the exact same state. Sometimes you even run into local and municipal regulations, and as you’re operating an entire portfolio, operators have an opportunity to expand and create a new building, or maybe to take on operation of an existing building that’s not in my portfolio today to really become part of a new community, I don’t necessarily have to think so much as I did before joining Procare HR on what’s under the hood there, and what are some of the things that might not be up to snuff? Because in our partnership, when you sign on the dotted line to really join that community you’re toward your portfolio. You’re also saying, hey, Procare, get to work. And so that makes it so that you can focus on what’s important, which is community building. And the people.
Closing Thoughts
Procare HR is looking for the movers and shakers in the innovators in seniors housing. We’re looking for the folks who understand that the way that organizations were run five, ten years ago doesn’t meet reality today, and that sometimes you need to shake things up and try something new in order to get results that you have never achieved before. Procare is the go-to thought leader for all things related to the employee experience, compliance, employee benefits and ultimately employment risk. Procare leadership consists of 70% former operators which allows the organization to be knowledgeable and experienced in providing HR managed solutions.
Contact us today to learn more about how Procare HR can empower your workforce.