Q&A: human resources.

• Position: Industry Outlook

Human resource executives are managing a lot of change, from the impacts of the Affordable Care Act to new overtime regulations to the Supreme Court decision regarding same-sex marriage. Here, HR leaders discuss what they're seeing on the ground as these changes take effect in their organizations.

We'd like to give a special thank you to David Cherrington, professor of organizational leadership at Brigham Young University, for moderating the discussion.

Bryan Benard

Holland & Hart

Kara Bergloff

Cafe Zupas

Cammie Cable

CLEARLINK

Tracee Comstock

Salt Lake SHRM

Taylor Cotterell

NaviTrust

Michael Dash

Parallel HR Solutions, Inc.

David Dyches

ISIhr

Dusty Fenwick

KLAS Enterprises

Lelie Hackett

Express Employment Professionals

Scott Hagen

Ray Quinney & Nebeker

Jeff Herring

University of Utah

Michael King

USANA Health Sciences

Jared Olsen

Xima Software

Shaun Orr

Big-D Construction

Linsdey Qualls

Pride Transport

Sharon Roux

THe Summit Group

Ann Thomas

Mercer

Monica Whalen

The Employers Council

David Cherrington

Brigham Young University

How have the healthcare changes impacted your organization or organizations you work with?

Companies are adapting to it. When the law was first passed, there was a bunch of doom and gloom; everybody panicked and said it's the end of the world as we all know it. In reality it's been more like the boiling frog, where everybody just said, "OK. There's a lot of hot water." But they started coming in slowly and adapting. Companies are more willing to accept the year-after-year impact: "Oh, now I've got to do this; now I've got to do this; now I've got to do this."

~ Ann Thomas

THOMAS: The biggest scramble right now for companies is getting ready to report according to the IRS guidelines. Then you follow that up with the regulations now being interpreted differently. So it's adding costs nobody forecasted for the upcoming year. But most employers are just taking it year by year. They're not necessarily kicking the can down the road, but they're saying, "We can handle this for the foreseeable future. So we'll stay in the game for the foreseeable future."

I'm seeing a lot of board rooms and a lot of benefits committees saying, "If it becomes too burdensome, we would be willing to evaluate getting out of the game." But right now they're still willing to just adapt year over year.

COMSTOCK: About 171 million people right now in the United States are going to be using employer-sponsored healthcare. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said for every employee you're paying per hour, you're paying an additional $3 per hour benefits cost. That could be costly to a lot of companies, especially companies who only have 50 employees. There's going to be a fine of $2,000 placed upon them--which can be a big burden--if they don't provide healthcare for their employees. So smaller employers are the ones I'm concerned about--just making sure they can manage the costs. Mid-sized and larger employers usually have more revenue coming in. But the smaller employers will really struggle with some of these challenges.

DASH: There are organizations who are providing health insurance reimbursement for employers and working directly with small business employees to pick out specific plans that cater to their family needs. And then the company really is only responsible for a certain reimbursement based on how they allocate things within the organization. Organizations like that are really helping small businesses control costs and at the same time provide that catered solution to the individual employee. So I think things are going to shift. And organizations like that are going to fill the need that really exists right now, especially in terms of controlling the cost factor.

DYCHES: There is some finality to the fact that all of the challenges to the law have been exhausted. So starting in January 2016, if you're an employer with 50 and above full-time equivalents, you have to have coverage. And there's finality with what the community rating is going to look like. Below 99 it'll be a community-rated, small group product. I think we're finally ready to say, as businesses, "It's in place, we need to adapt and adopt, and find disruptive, creative solutions, knowing that the law is the law and we have to accept it."

HACKETT: I'm in the temporary help industry. Because we're large and our temporaries belong to headquarters, we fall under that. In my industry, we offer benefits to those people from day one. We're talking about people who work anywhere from $10 to $20 an hour. Nobody's even taking the benefits. And we subsidize it. But the cost to manage that as an employer is ridiculous. That's the piece nobody's talking about. We have the cost of the benefit itself, but also the cost of managing whether or not we're in compliance. I work with a lot of small business, they're now crossing from 48 to 55. It's really costing employers a lot of money.

BERGLOFF: That's where we're struggling as well, especially with the high turnover. It's an added burden that keeps doubling and doubling and we're just struggling to keep up.

COTTERELL: Plus companies are getting creative and getting around regulations. There's a company that we're working with right now that's between the 50 and 100 mark employee size. And suddenly they're two companies instead of just one company.

HACKETT: Or they're calling people like me to stay under that threshold. When they're right around that mark, they're a little reticent to actually add them permanently until they know they're a keeper.

THOMAS: That's evidenced by the explosion of vendors that are willing to third-party IRS regulation of the new forms, the 1095s and the 1096s. I'd say six months ago, it wasn't really on anybody's radar. Three months ago you all of a sudden had these venders saying we're not taking any more new clients because we can't handle the volume. But I'm guessing when W-2s came out there was a similar type of thing, where everybody said, "Oh, no. The sky's falling. The IRS is causing us all these issues."

The administrative burden right now is extremely high, especially since a lot of this is being done manually, trying to go backward and fill in the gaps where we didn't track it and now we have to. Over the course of time, the market is finding solutions for that, whether it be payroll venders or third-party venders. They're finding ways to take that administrative burden off. It'll never go away because the regulations are very clear that the employer's responsible for certain things and no one can take that off your plate.

It is a transition time. Long-term, it's going to change the way people do business. At some point, the administrative burden becomes too much and they will shift it. The exchange is one of those ways people are shifting it, getting out of benefits--still offering it, but letting the exchange handle the administrative burden.

ROUX: We've already made the philosophical choice to get out of that game. We're at about 85 employees, but can't use the exchange yet. So we're stuck in that no man's land, where we're providing the benefits like we always have, but I'm looking forward, thinking that's a very viable choice for us when it becomes available. Strategically it makes sense. Put employers back to working on the business of their business. Right? Not spending lots of time worried about administering benefits. So if I could spend my time more on understanding our business and how our landscape is changing and getting the right people to work in that business rather than tracking month by month the administration for a 1095, that would be a much better use of my time and better for our business strategically.

But short term, I'm struggling. I'm kind of a one-woman shop. So I'm trying to figure out how to manage that whole 1095 reporting issue. Most of us have disparate systems, so bringing that together so you can create those reports is a challenge. I've interviewed about four different venders in that space. What worries me is that nobody's done it before, so nobody's an expert. I've actually started creating my own systems to report and collect that data.

CHERRINGTON: I am surprised more companies have not immediately abandoned the whole benefit-providing game and offloaded it: We will give you this much money, you go to the federal exchange or to a state exchange. I'm personally just surprised that rational decision...