Are HR Tasks Distracting You from Your Mission?
As a nonprofit organization you understand that furthering your mission means everything. It’s the primary purpose for your team — implementing ideas, raising funds, building connections with stakeholders and supporting internal operations. If your goal is to get the most out of your budget and resources, it’s essential to minimize the distractions and barriers that get in your way. An often overlooked opportunity — particularly for smaller, growing nonprofits — is human resources operations.
Often the HR responsibilities fall to one of the organization’s directors as one of the things they manage on any given day. Time spent answering questions from employees, figuring out how to develop and implement policies, managing benefits administration and payroll, and handling other daily operational tasks means less time to support mission-centric work. That, and any potential errors or mistakes means you have to redirect resources to pay fines or spend time mitigating problems. And the workload and risks only continue to grow as your nonprofit scales.
This is why HR services for nonprofits through a provider like a professional employer organization (PEO) makes sense — and why more and more nonprofits are doing so. With a PEO, many of your most administrative and repetitive tasks are handled by an expert third-party that contractually assumes some of the risk associated with them. Additionally, your PEO partner can assist in developing strategy, administering benefits, providing training and coaching, and more. Let’s explore a few specific advantages of using HR services from a PEO provider.
Learn more about how the PEO model works and the numerous advantages it provides.
A PEO Makes Your HR Team More Mission-Centric
In a nonprofit, every department and team contributes to furthering the organization’s mission in its own way. HR supports the people making it happen by handling payroll, compliance matters, policies, benefits, time and attendance, and countless other functions. However, HR should play a mission-driven role in shaping the organization through its people — by nurturing your talent base and developing them into strong leaders. A PEO frees up nonprofit HR teams to do exactly that.
A PEO Extends Your Team’s Expertise
If you’re a smaller nonprofit, your HR team is likely fairly small. Even if that team is supporting less than 100 people, their plates are still full with managing benefits processes, taking care of payroll, potentially dealing with remote work compliance challenges, doing research, and handling a daily influx of questions. Often, these team members won’t have the time or expertise needed to address technical industry changes or more complex matters because they’re focused on core operations. But with a PEO, their true expertise can be put to more mission-oriented tasks. A PEO becomes an extension of your team, providing them and your employees with expert-level knowledge where you need it, including compliance matters, policy development, and all other aspects of HR.
Go in-depth on the PEO model with seven reasons to put it to work for your nonprofit.
A PEO Helps You Maximize Your HR Budget
Resources at a nonprofit are precious. Hiring in HR is likely further down in the talent acquisition priority list as opposed to finding the right people for fundraising, development, strategy, and other related roles. Rather than having to press for resources for another body on the team (only to be met with the challenges mentioned just above), nonprofit HR services through a PEO give you the expertise and capabilities of a full team — one that brings decades of collective experience to the table in compliance, payroll, benefits, policy, and more. This means your existing team can better utilize its budget, get the knowledge it needs, and continue focusing on supporting the mission of the organization.
A PEO Reduces Risk and Strengthens Compliance
Despite your status as a nonprofit organization, there are still numerous compliance and tax-related matters that are a significant demand on your HR team. If you have people working remotely in different states, the complexity only increases as different municipalities and states have different requirements — many of which require research and implementation into existing systems. This is only one example of the many financial, legal, and operational risks associated with HR. But because a PEO contractually assumes some of these risks and handles the workload associated with them, that pressure and time investment is no longer a problem for your team.
Work with Cognos HR for Nonprofit HR Services
Cognos HR partners with nonprofit organizations, and more, in Chicago and across the country to provide a complete portfolio of HR capabilities, including PEO services. To date, our HR services for nonprofits have helped grow organizations and teams seamlessly while we take care of the many tasks that otherwise would distract them from their mission-driven work. Our PEO services span four key areas:
HR infrastructure expertise and support
Payroll administration and compliance
Group benefit plans, administration, and reporting
Risk management
When you partner with us for your HR needs, you gain the expertise and reliability of a dedicated HR team, reduce the cost and risk associated with HR, and improve your operational efficiency by working with knowledgeable and experienced professionals.
Connect with us today to learn more about our PEO services and how we can help support your mission.