Building your Workforce with Stephen Blair

Full transcript

Building a workforce when your people are everywhere

I am the president of Lyceum Insurance Services. We are actually a family business — I tried to get out for a while but they dragged me back in. My father has since retired, but we are a 50-year-old business. We have been assisting and helping clients with their employee benefit needs, their risk management in terms of business insurances, and their HR needs for going on 50 years now.

We assist businesses mostly in the small to medium-sized range, though we work with some very large customers as well. We help them build, design, implement and administrate their employee benefit programmes. With the things that are changing in the marketplace today, we also help them evaluate and protect their business from external things that could damage it — making sure they have proper cyber security in place, and that their directors and officers cover and other protections are there, so if a company is sued they have the right things in place.

Retention is really near and dear to my heart right now. The workplace has changed since Covid and we have seen two things happen. One is an employee exodus: employees who used to live and work in the Washington DC metropolitan area have started moving all over the country, and in fact all over the world. I have talked to people in the Middle East, South America, Europe and Asia. Companies were designing and building employee benefit programmes based on people being here, and when people started moving around that adds another layer of problems — not only in administration, but in making sure the data we move around is moved securely.

I like to say we are a 50-year-old startup company, because the industry has changed so much.

Stephen Blair, President, Lyceum Insurance Services

The second thing is a lot of employees leaving employment for reasons that surprise you. Somebody will call and say they are leaving and want to talk about COBRA, and when I ask what they are doing next they say they do not know yet. People are reevaluating their lives, and a lot of the time they are simply not happy where they are. So the big problem companies have is how to attract and retain the talent they have. We have been spending a lot of time with clients on employee and executive compensation programmes, and making sure the benefits in place work for people no matter where they happen to be located.

The data points I look at first are the size of the organisation, because different rules apply to small versus medium versus large, especially around the Department of Labor — we want every client to have compliance procedures in place so they would pass an audit. The second is where the employees are located, so that the programmes and carriers we use have proper coverage in those areas and enough access points for people to get care.

Technology has drastically changed our industry. We started seeing more of it pushed into a very paper-driven industry about five years ago. It is not easy to walk into somebody’s office and ask for their paper any more, so we want to make sure we are transmitting data effectively and securely. With the increase in hacking, anything involving information moving from an employee to HR, from HR to us, or from us to a carrier matters — we are moving HIPAA data. Not only the employee’s name, address, date of birth, salary and job title, but personal medical information. That is very private and very sensitive data.