MBA1970 Q&A Wednesday: How do I handle health insurance for my global remote team?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred dollar MBA Show Business simplified every single day with our daily ten minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher. Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar MBA Net. Today's question is from Gabe and Gabe asks how do I handle health insurance with my global remote team? I've just started my business and I'm hiring people from across the world and I'm wondering should I offer health insurance and if so, how do I do it with everybody in different countries? Great question Gabe. Many people are in the same boat as you Gabe, who are building remote teams. This is becoming the norm now and they're hiring talent from across the world. We'll talk about should you offer health insurance? Is this an option that is expected everywhere in the world? Also, if you do decide to offer health insurance, what are your options when you have so many different countries to deal with and if you're going to offer it as a company, you you don't want to limit yourself to hiring people only in places that you can provide insurance. So we'll get into all that and some options when it comes to insurance across the world and help you and everybody who's listening navigate this whole insurance thing when it comes to remote teams. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business, guys.

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So today on Q and A Wednesday, Gabe asks, how do I handle health insurance? When building a remote team, a global remote team, the first thing I want to address or just kind of talk about is the concept of providing health insurance as an employer. In many countries, this is kind of what people expect, is kind of the standard in terms of getting a job. The employee is expecting to have some sort of health coverage or some sort of health fund, whether they contribute to it or it's paid for in total. This is very common in countries like the US but it's not as common as you might think in other countries, especially countries with national healthcare, like the uk, like Canada, like Australia, like most of Europe. This means that they live in a country where the basic health insurance is kind of covered by their own taxes, is covered by the government. And if you want to buy health insurance, this is kind of like premium health insurance, which would cover like things like dental, vision and maybe being cared for and going to hospitals that are not public. For for example, in Australia, most people can be totally fine with the national healthcare service here, but some people do opt for paying for private insurance to get some of those things like dental, like vision, remedial massage, things like that. But I have to say that it is nowhere near as expensive as health insurance in the U.S. like, the premium health insurance here is something like 6, $700 a year. Obviously it all depends on your age and your health and all that kind of stuff. But under $1,000 for many people in the US this is their premium every month. So this is just a little bit of the landscape now. If you do want to offer health insurance to everybody as kind of a blanket policy in your company. It's not a straightforward thing. And I actually looked into this in detail. There are companies that kind of advertise as healthcare for remote teams, and they do a pretty good with that. But they have to kind of negotiate around the fact that health insurance or health care in general is more expensive in some places in the world than others. And I'll talk a little bit about what those options are, are an option that I kind of recommend. But first, let's talk about should you offer health insurance to your whole company, your whole team, or not? Well, this is really a business decision. At the end of the day, I like to see the package you're offering your employees as a package, as a total package. For example, somebody might be offering a job and the pay is $40,000 a year, but it comes with insurance, and it comes with this perk and that perk and days off and a fund for professional development and a bunch of other things. But basically you have to look at it as a package. How much is the total value of that? The total value of that might be, let's say, $48,000 with everything included. Somebody might say, great, but a similar job at a different company is offering me 50 grand. What if I cover all the other stuff where I pay for my own insurance and choose the perks I want? And usually they will come up on top or be in the plus. In terms of comparing both packages, it just depends on how you want to package your offering or your offers to your employees. If you can break it down and show them that you the value of your package, whatever is included, is pretty competitive. You're going to get some pretty competitive hires and you'll be competitive in the marketplace. I also think it's helpful to give them some resources. So say, for example, they're in the US and they're like, I love your package, but I'm not really sure how to get insurance for myself. I've never done this before. Maybe giving them some options, some recommendations of how they can purchase their own health insurance and they can see for themselves, okay, this is going to cost me X amount. I'm getting that much and more in my package. I have to say, it does kind of simplify things in terms of your business and your budgeting for staff and all that kind of stuff. When you have, you know, a solid base salary and the perks that have a solid cost or a defined cost, you know you're going to spend X amount of money on a retreat, X amount of money on professional development courses for each employee, that type of thing, you can easily say, okay, every hire is going to cost me this much money, and then they can sort out their insurance. But when you throw the insurance thing in the mix, you will see now that it starts to get a little hairy. And it's hard to say, hey, I need a hire for this position. This is what the position is going to cost me. You're not going to know for sure until you know where that hire is based. If you are including insurance in your package. So what are some options? Well, there's actually not a whole bunch of options if you want to go with one insurance provider for your entire remote global team. But the one that I would Recommend is called Safetywing. Safetywing.com and if you go to their site, you can kind of play around with their calculator. They're really, really transparent. I really love that about them. In terms of what the insurance covers, where is covered, and all the details on the homepage, you can basically choose how many people are in your team, how many people you want to insure, and then it'll kind of give you a rough calculation of how many dollars you will spend, how much money you will spend per employee every month. Now, there is one hiccup. Like I said, not all countries are the same when it comes to the cost of healthcare. And they're upfront about that because you can plug in the name of a country and it'll tell you what their insurance covers. So their basic coverage, their basic plan, that kind of what they quote the price on on the homepage, it doesn't cover residents that live in America. It covers, for example, people that visit and are there for a short period of time. You're going to have to upgrade your employees that are in the US to one of their more expensive plans, at least for those employees. So you can cover U.S. residents. And you're going to have to read the details of what exactly it covers. Some countries it's a whole lot easier. Like the United Kingdom, like the uk, you are totally covered as a resident. You're totally covered if you visit. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they have national healthcare, right? So the cost of healthcare is lower there, and therefore it's easier for them to insure you in that country. Now, what I like about safetywing is that they tell you if it's covered if you're traveling there or if you are living there, because many people that hire remote employees. These people love to travel. This is why they love remote work. They love to travel, they love getting around the world. And believe me, these people, they continue to do this in the pandemic. We have people on our team like that, which is kind of inspiring. But the point here is, is that this is good to know if you want to make sure that when they travel or at least in plea can know, hey, if I go to this country, will I be covered? I'll be covered, will be covered. They can easily go to the website and check it out. But the bottom line is that there won't be one standard price for everybody. You're going to have to create different plans for people in different parts of the world. But with safety wings, it's as easy as it's going to be for a remote team that is scattered in different countries.

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To wrap up today's lesson Today's Q and A Wednesday's question from Gabe. You can choose to offer health insurance or not offer it as a part of your package. These are two different options as long as you're giving just as much value. And if you do offer health insurance, I recommend safetywing to cover all your remote players, remote team members across the globe. I do have to say that what I love about it is that it gets more affordable as you scale so as your team grows, the lower your rates become. And of course you can add and remove coverage easily as you hire and fire different team members. They're not a sponsor of the show, they're just somebody I heard of and read about. So you might want to check them out if you're interested. Safetywing.com that wraps up today's episode. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over@omar00mba.net and we'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the biggest perks of being Part of a remote team is having your own autonomy of time, of space. And as you grow your remote team, you'll start to realize that you can run your business by a different set of rules. It's your business at the end of the day. So, for example, instead of just sticking to a certain number of public holidays in the country that we're headquartered in, we give our employees five local holidays. So wherever they are in the world, they can choose when they want to take these five local holidays, because holidays are different in different countries. Obviously, we do have set days that we're all off on, things like Christmas and New Year's and Easter. But in addition to their annual leave balance and their sick leave balance and all that, they get five days that they can choose and say, hey, this is going to be my local holiday. I'm going to take it off this day. This is kind of a sweet perk for a lot of remote employees, because normally when they work for a company that's based in the usa, for example, they have to be off on the holidays. That mean something in the us but in their country, it may not mean much like Independence Day. They may want to be off with their family and friends and when it's Independence Day in their country. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of foreign.

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