Offering employee benefits is a great tool for recruiting and retention. Pinnacle has a menu of voluntary employee benefit options available for your stylists. These options include: dental plans, life insurance, vision coverage, a limited health plan, and short-term disability. You may be surprised to learn that any full-time team member (averaging 30 hours per week) can get access to these benefits at no cost to you as the Team Leader.  In that sense, they are “free” to you. Your Pinnacle admin fee already includes benefits administration, which takes care of communication on benefit options, negotiating pricing with insurance carriers, marketing materials, enrollment forms, setting up pre-tax benefit deductions from payroll checks, collecting the premiums, paying the carriers and so forth. Some Team Leaders have chosen to make a partial contribution towards the premiums, but there is no requirement to contribute.

Some other advantages include:

• The prices are already negotiated by Pinnacle and are the same nationally.
• Pinnacle splits the premium into two payroll deductions per month, and takes deductions before taxes under a Section 125 plan to save stylists from paying taxes on their entire paycheck.
• Coverage is available without providing health histories or having to obtain a physical exam.
• There is no minimum number of employees who must enroll. If one stylist wants any one of the benefits, that’s fine with us!

Pinnacle’s Annual Benefits Open Enrollment period occurs July 1 – July 24, 2017, with the coverage taking effect on August 1, 2017.  The pricing and enrollment forms will be made available on your custom Pinnacle website.  See http://sportclips.pinnaclepeo.com/ under “Benefits Enrollment”.  Pinnacle routinely puts flyers into the FedEx envelopes when paychecks are sent out in July.  These flyers are reminders that it is open enrollment time!  We encourage you to share this information with your store managers so all eligible stylists can have a chance to enroll.

Offering health insurance is a more complex process and, of course, is more expensive to the Team Leader and the stylist.  Consult your account rep, Ron Rice at (512) 431-7620, or Pinnacle’s benefits department at (210) 344-2088 to inquire about options that may be available to you.