In many ways, employers don't have to stray very far from tradition for help when it comes to providing employee benefits. There are some basic services that require coverage, such as health insurance and retirement funds, but many other provisions might seem incidental. The best way to ensure a staff is being compensated in the most appropriate fashion is to confer with an employee benefit consultant to keep costs low while coverage is made more than adequate.
However, times do change, and many organizations need to keep up with the manner in which society and workforces are transformed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in marriage arrangements. Besides the fact that quite a few couples are electing to simply cohabitate rather than marry, there has also been an increase in the number of gay and lesbian partners who want the same legal recognition as traditional spouses.
For example, the states of New York and Maryland have both passed legislation guaranteeing the right for homosexual couples to marry and receive equal protection under the law in the past year. This is a very important issue for companies to account for when creating employee benefit packages because quite a few types of coverage allow for beneficiaries to be named in policy documentation.
The best way to decide if this is an appropriate course of action to take is by meeting with an employee benefit consulting service. Of course, there's a fine line to be walked between alienating traditional couples, and some states still do not recognize same sex marriages. However, if a business operates in an area that is particularly friendly to gay rights or employs a workforce predisposed to supporting such measures, changing with the times can do a great deal to inure a staff to its employer.
