In this economy, employers are getting creative, adding sometimes nontraditional benefits to help employees save money in their personal budgets by taking advantage of group rates their managers negotiated.

While many familiar benefits remain, other options, such as legal insurance, group-rate auto and home insurance, reduced-price fitness memberships or day care, and even adoption assistance are among those being offered by employers here.

Such benefits, often known as optional or elective benefits, are in addition to standard benefits such as health care and dental coverage and vacation time.

Some opt-in benefits don't cost employers a lot of extra money, but help employees save money on things they might otherwise buy on their own, so they're gaining in popularity, employers here say.

Rockwood Retirement Communities, for instance, offers its employees group rates for gym memberships, while Spokane-based Avista Corp. offers a range of elective benefits including tuition reimbursement and even financial assistance with the costs of adopting a child.

Among its elective benefits, Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center & Children's Hospital offers its employees a suite of optional insurance including auto, legal, and home insurance, discounted gym memberships, and discounted child care for the kids of part-time employees at St. Anne's Children and Family Center, says Kathy Sewell, the hospital's director of human resources.

A range of insurance options


As a privately held company, Goodale & Barbieri Co., of Spokane, has sought to maintain the high level of benefits it offered its employees before it was spun off from the publicly-held Red Lion Hotels Corp. in 2006, says Chris Baird, the Spokane-based real estate development and property management company's controller. It has nearly identical benefits now, Baird says, with the exception of an on-site day care that it had offered its employees here, which remained under the ownership of Red Lion Hotels, he says. The company offers its more than 90 employees some elective insurance benefits that it subsidizes 100 percent, and others that are paid for by employees, but for which the company secures group rates.

In addition to offering a 50 percent match of 401(k) contributions up to 3 percent of the employee's salary, Goodale & Barbieri pays 100 percent of the premiums for its employees' long-term disability insurance. As nonsubsidized benefits, it offers to its employees life insurance and accidental death and dismemberment insurance, as well as the full line of Aflac products, which consist of cash-benefit insurance policies, Baird says.

In addition, Goodale & Barbieri is seeking ways to help employees reduce costs on regular benefits. This year, for example, the company has begun offering its employees two health-care options to help them reduce health insurance costs. The change has been well-received, with about 60 percent of the company's employees choosing the scaled-down plan, reducing their individual health insurance costs by 5 percent this year, Baird says.

Mary Prince, Avista's manager of corporate benefits, says the energy company conducts employee surveys regularly, and seeks to provide benefits that are of most use to employees.

"Our employees are not shy about letting us know things they like or dislike," and that's a good thing, she says.

In recent years, for example, Avista began offering long-term care insurance based on employee requests.

Prince says that as more employees reached a point in their lives when they became responsible for caring for elderly parents, it became more of a forefront issue for them.

Some of the other optional benefits Avista offers its employees are life insurance and disability insurance, both of which are paid for by the employees.

Avista is rolling out two new employee-paid group-rate benefits this fall when it has its open enrollment, Price says. One is an auto- and home-insurance plan, and the other is a legal coverage plan. The legal plan allows employees to pay a monthly premium to have access to legal assistance for various legal issues, including adoptions, prenuptial agreements, wills and trusts, elder care, issues, powers of attorney, and even such things as traffic court issues or tax audit representation.

Prince says Avista listens to its employees' requests, and researches whether it can offer such benefits, but sometimes it doesn't make good fiscal sense to extend certain benefits, she says. Prince says that there definitely is a sense of being more cautious in the current economy. She says that Avista has a limited budget for benefits and tries to watch how it spends its available funds.

At times, for example, there have been large numbers of employees with young children at Avista, which led to more requests for a day-care benefit, but when Avista did a study of that type of benefit, it found that it wasn't feasible, she says.

"It didn't make sense to get into the day-care business," Prince says.

Quality of life benefits

Other optional benefits that organizations offer are more quality-of-life oriented, including fitness- and public transportation-related benefits.

An employee survey prompted Rockwood Retirement to add a corporate membership to the YMCA as an optional benefit for its employees, says Steve Smithmeyer, its director of human services.

Such programs that let employers take advantage of group rates to offer their employees optional benefits are the best of both worlds for the employer and its employees, Smithmeyer says. The employees get a reduced price on their fitness memberships, and it doesn't cost Rockwood anything to offer it. A minimum of five employees have to participate in order to secure the corporate rate, an easy goal for the 300-employee retirement center operator to attain, Smithmeyer says. He says Rockwood considers its extras carefully each year to make sure what it is offering is in line with its budget.

Spokane Transit Authority has an on-site gym, a benefit that's paid for by an employee group workers have an option of joining. The members of the group contribute a small amount of money each month for maintenance of the equipment, which the group also purchased, although all STA employees have access to it, says STA spokeswoman Molly Myers.

All STA employees and their dependents also get free access to STA's public transportation system, a popular benefit, says Diana Broach, a human resources specialist there.

The company offers its employees a help line for confidential counseling and referral services by telephone for employees who have either personal or work issues, Broach says.

Goodale & Barbieri also offers free bus passes, as well as a free parking benefit at designated parking lots downtown for its corporate employees. If an employee wants to use a parking lot outside the network, the company reimburses the employee up to the amount it would pay for the employee to park in the designated lots, Baird says.

The company also offers, in addition to regular vacation time, extra paid holidays such as Martin Luther King Day and the day after Thanksgiving, and an annual end-of-year break during the week between Christmas and New Year's days. Salaried employees get paid for that time off, and hourly employees have the option to take that time off, though they don't get paid for it.

Baird says such benefits provide a morale boost and are appreciated by the company's employees.

"We like our holidays," he says.