Brand Story – GNSA helps businesses gain long-term scalability while mitigating risk.
In today’s competition for talent, multi-state employment has emerged as a winning strategy, albeit a challenging one. For many companies, the promise of deeper talent pools simply outweighs the risks. Great Northern Staff Administrators (GNSA) helps Oregon’s employers successfully manage their multi-state workforces without succumbing to costly pitfalls.
After years of experience, GNSA knows the common mistakes and missed opportunities it can expect to find within organizations of all sizes. Since these issues revolve around payroll taxes, multi-state compliance, employee benefits and remote employee engagement, consequences can prove significant: A loss of employee engagement affects service quality, reputation, talent acquisition and more. Issues with payroll, compliance and benefits lead to expensive penalties and unhappy employees.
Rather than a siloed customer service model built around support tickets and individual representatives, GNSA uses a team-based approach when partnering with clients. It begins with an in-depth assessment of the business in order to pinpoint and maximize the value that its HCM solutions and services can provide, while also identifying challenges and gaps in compliance.
According to GNSA President Katharina Fink, multi-state employee strategies are inherently difficult to execute: “When we take on a new multi-state client, we know that, in most cases, we are going to find some issues. They often don’t fully understand what they need to do, because it’s complicated and often new ground for them. Have they registered their business correctly? Have they set up appropriate policies? Are they withholding taxes properly? Every state is different. Oklahoma has two types of payroll taxes. New York has 15.”
Whether setting companies up with nationwide insurance partners or aligning them with multiple state labor laws and tax requirements, GNSA gives organizations the knowledge and ability to monitor, manage and scale every aspect of their employee management with confidence.
“Navigating the complexity of multi-state registrations can be difficult at its simplest,” echoes Renee Kempka, Finance and Administration Director at a multi-state organization that is one of GNSA’s many multi-state clients. “When you layer the various state and city tax types and districts, it can be mind-boggling. As our company has grown in staff size and locations, GNSA’s staff have been most helpful with the registration, tax setup, quarterly tax payments and various other processes. To date, we have worked with 40 different state tax registrations, and process payroll in all 50 states.”
Digitalization brings scalability, regardless of whether that means expanding into five states or 25. With access to a geospatial tax engine based on the employees’ addresses, organizations can automatically pinpoint the federal, state and local tax and benefit obligations for each person on their payroll.
“I especially appreciated the adjustment made to employees who work in more than one state,” adds another GNSA client Cindy Harkey, Payroll & Benefits Specialist. “GNSA was able to add in a drop-down box within the payroll processing under each employee, so I can select which state they were working in for that pay cycle. This helps direct the taxes and workers’ compensation information when we run reports after each payroll and annually. The first year before we set that up, I had to manually separate earnings. This was a godsend!”
However, not only are these organizations left to make sense of complex tax and benefit obligations, but now must find a way to continue training, engaging and retaining their employees remotely. Successful out-of-state recruitment, after all, is just half of the equation. The real test is successful retention.
Due to Covid-19, many employers unwittingly transitioned to a multi-state model as workers left the office, sometimes returning to a different home state. Top sectors, such as professional services, technical services, finance and insurance, saw their remote workforces grow from 17 percent in 2019 to 39 percent in 2021 (American Community Survey and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).
The answer to effective employee engagement in a remote world? The right digital technologies and strategies.
“For new employees who are used to being in an office, we still have to create that feeling of belonging. We help clients solve that. Performance management and onboarding is all evolving, and that’s where we really empower them,” Fink explains. “Younger generations want an environment where they’re recognized. They are almost craving that family connection at work.”
Curating technologies and carrying out large-scale software deployment is a daunting task for any organization, especially one unfamiliar with digital processes. By facilitating and supporting the adoption of cutting-edge human capital management (HCM) technologies, GNSA helps them cut costs, improve organization-wide visibility, get compliant and achieve the agility and resilience needed to scale and adapt to a rapidly changing world. And as a digital innovation partner, GNSA works with organizations to modernize and digitalize their processes, which, surprisingly, are often still paper-based.
Beyond risk management and compliance, an HCM platform offers transformative employee engagement channels that meet changing expectations. Via one platform, employers can measure performance, maintain open channels of communication and boost engagement, for example with birthday and workplace anniversary popups. Importantly, they can also facilitate trainings and certifications.
With industry-leading technologies, expertise and customer service, GNSA wants to help Oregon’s multi-state employers avoid risks and penalties, but it also sees a larger opportunity: “We want to digitalize, streamline and automate their back office so that they can focus on their core business,” Fink concludes. “If they see an opportunity, we want them to be able to go for it!”
Brand stories are paid content articles that allow Oregon Business advertisers to share news about their organizations and engage with readers on business and public policy issues. The stories are produced in house by the Oregon Business marketing department. For more information, contact associate publisher Courtney Kutzman.
