While many companies were shrinking headcount during the pandemic, home care provider Honor was growing rapidly, expanding its employee base from five to 25 states in the last year, with a goal of doubling its remote-first workforce over the next year or two.

With that kind of massive growth has come the twin challenges of providing competitive benefits to all of its workers no matter where they live, while remaining compliant with state and local regulations across the country.

“Our goal is to become the employer of choice in the home care space,” said Michelle Nezamabadi, Honor’s Director of People Operations. “We want every person who wants to be a caregiver to come work for us and to really set the bar for pay and benefits. Sequoia is helping us get there.”

Michelle, who joined Honor in August of 2020, worked closely with her team at Sequoia on benchmarking to determine what Honor needed to offer to meet its goal of competitive benefits, with plans that met the needs of employees in every category, from caregivers to engineers.

Providing a new standard of benefits in home healthcare

Meeting that goal meant coming up with a mix of plans to help employees care for themselves and their families, from an easy copay PPO, to plans with little-to-no out-of-pocket costs for caregivers on hourly salaries.

Michelle enlisted the help of her Sequoia team to survey different employee populations and conduct focus groups to create the most meaningful benefits packages. Then, after coming up with some creative solutions to fit employee needs, Sequoia continued to negotiate with carriers until Honor secured the best rates for these plans.

When it was determined that major cost savings could be achieved by going to a self-funded dental plan, Sequoia coached Michelle through the process, a change that is now saving the company over $100,000 a year.

“Employees are not seeing a single difference in their healthcare benefits, and in fact, we added a mix of mental and behavioral health offerings while still keeping costs down. All we’ve had to do is carve away a few hours a month for internal administration on our part,” Michelle explained. “I did not expect it to be that easy.”

Michelle was also able to get Honor’s paid parental leave program approved with benchmarking research from Sequoia, as well as added paid disability leave, putting the company at the top of the market for this type of coverage.

“I am very proud of how Honor supports our employees during times of need through generous benefits and supportive policies.”

Keeping up with all of these very nuanced compliance issues has been almost a full-time job, yet we haven’t had to hire a second person, because Sequoia has been such an amazing partner to us.

Working together to ensure compliance

Of course, ensuring the company remains in compliance with employee benefits regulation has also become a bigger task in the last year, as the company has ramped up hiring and moved to a distributed-first workforce spread out across the country.

Over the last six months, Honor has hired more than 900 employees – mostly caregivers – and that has meant staying on top of state, county and city regulations when they bring on employees in a new area.

For example, Sequoia has helped ensure Honor complies with San Francisco’s Health Care Spending Ordinance, which mandates certain health care expenditures on behalf of employees each quarter, and has helped Honor communicate with employees about this requirement and any related waivers required of employees.

Michelle is also working with Sequoia to ensure compliance as Honor transitions carriers with its 401(k) as the company continues to quickly scale.

“Keeping up with all of these very nuanced compliance issues has been almost a full-time job, yet we’ve not had to hire a second person because Sequoia has been such an amazing partner,” Michelle said.

“I’m in contact with someone from our Sequoia team almost every day. They are helping us stay above or ahead of the curve – I don’t know how we’d do it without them.”