You might not realize it, but legal problems are zapping your employee’s productivity. If you’re a small business owner, you know how vital it is not to lose productivity, especially when you’re competing with big-box stores and chains. How your employees handle their personal problems at work directly affects your bottom line as a business owner.
How Legal Problems Affect Productivity
According to a Harris Interactive survey, employees say legal problems affect their health and that they’re using work time to handle them.
Think about how a sick or distracted employee performs compared to a healthy, focused one. There are going to be more mistakes, more problems and more time taken to accomplish the same tasks. The Harris interactive poll found that 43 percent of employees said their legal problems negatively impacted their physical and emotional health.
When those employees didn’t have a lawyer, the stress of a legal problem further impacted their work. Among those without a lawyer, employees are 3 times more likely to use work time to handle their personal legal problem and 50 percent of them had to take time off work to deal with their legal issue.
How Productivity Affects Your Bottom Line
Time wasted at work and lower productivity are costing your business money and efficiency. In fact, most employees are not as productive as they could be. According to a Gallup Poll, 7 out of 10 U.S. employees say they aren’t fully engaged at work and 64 percent say they visit non work-related websites every day.
Software company Employee PC has demonstrated how this affects a business. According to their estimates, the average employee spends 75 minutes of every work day doing non-work-related tasks. For a company with 100 employees, each earning $25 an hour, that translates to an $812,500 loss in productivity each year.
Productivity is also an indicator of how happy your employees are. Happy, satisfied employees are 31 percent more productive, generate 37 percent more sales and are three times more creative, according to research from career website Good & Co.
The Cost of Employee Retention
As a small business owner, you know how crucial it is to retain the best employees and not let them get scooped up by your competitors. It’s estimated that losing an employee and hiring a replacement costs 150% of the former employees salary. With the average turnover rate at 15 percent, that’s a lot of money your business could be losing every year.
How Employee Benefits Can Help
More and more employers are offering voluntary benefits to their employees to provide more services with less cost. Eastbridge Consulting Group Inc. in Avon, Connecticut, projects that sales of voluntary benefits for 2015 will increase between 3 percent and 6 percent from 2014, and will continue to rise 3 percent to 5 percent over the next several years. These benefits offer targeted coverage for employees at no cost to their employers.
Benefits can be key in retaining good employees. A 2010 survey showed 43 percent of employees state their benefits package kept them in their current job. And voluntary benefits do that too – According to a Hartford study, employees who are offered voluntary benefits reported higher satisfaction with their benefits than did those who were not offered voluntary products.
Legal Insurance Cuts Legal Problem Productivity
What if every time your employees had a legal issue – big or small – they knew there would be a qualified lawyer available to help them and that their legal fees would be paid for? That’s the kind of money-saving power and peace of mind that legal insurance can offer.
If you’re a small business owner in Texas, there’s no better plan for your employees than Texas Legal. We offer competitive premiums with lots of added benefits like identity theft protection and financial counseling, along with the most comprehensive coverage on the market. Best of all, we have over 500 lawyers in every corner of the state, ready to serve you and your employees. Like you, we’re a local business focused on serving Texans, and you’ll see that in our superior customer service.
If you’d like to learn more about legal insurance, read more here at I’ve Never Heard of Legal Insurance. What Is It?, or if you want to know more about becoming a group with Texas Legal, visit our Employer and Benefits Administrator page. Want to talk to someone about Texas Legal’s great group plans? Sign up to request more information here or call us directly at 1-800-252-9346. You can also see our group plan prices (100% employee paid) and coverage levels at our Group Legal Insurance Plans page.