By: Sara Kline,February 1, 2017

Professional Employer Organizations, commonly known as PEOs, provide services to over 3 million employees across our county and have done so for over 30 years.  PEOs provide Human Resource Outsourcing in the areas of:

• Employee Relations
• Employee Benefits
• Risk Management
• Workers’ Compensation
• Payroll

The Midwest is relatively unaware of PEO’s and the benefits they can provide to small and mid-size businesses.  This underutilized HR solution can be the catapult that takes an entrepreneur to a successful business owner, or launch an established business into higher growth.

Business owners have a few options in regards to handling important HR functions, including:

• Do it internally yourself or by leveraging existing staff
• Hire dedicated HR staff with the skills needed to deliver the required HR services to your business
• Source to multiple suppliers to handle payroll, benefits, etc. and manage these suppliers yourself
• Engage a PEO as a single supplier solution to provide and manage all your business’ HR needs

What makes the PEO option particularly unique and beneficial is their ability to pool their clients together to access affordable benefits not feasible with the other three options.  Likewise the PEO option is the only option that allows you and your team to remain focused on your core business.   Statistics demonstrate that PEO clients grow 7 to 9 percent faster, have 10 – 14 percent lower rates of employee turnover, and are 50 percent less likely to go out of business than other comparable small businesses. So why is that? Here’s what one industry leader had to say in Inc. Magazine,

“There are 168 hours in the week, and you’ve got to spend some of them sleeping and eating. The more of the rest of them you can devote to issues strategic to your business—as opposed to administrative headaches—the greater your opportunities for growth and success are going to be.” – Pat Cleary, President and CEO, NAPEO

As a business owner you can proactively jumpstart your business into compliance which ultimately increases productivity and profit, while mitigating risks.  As the government changes, there is no doubt that each state will begin to implement their own conflicting employment laws which will make navigating employee compliance incredibly tricky. To learn more about the industry’s most trusted PEOs please visit napeo.org.