Employee Benefits                                                                                       

We provide comprehensive health and welfare benefits brokerage/consulting services to help control costs and maximize available resources. Our employee benefits services include management of competitive bids, contract negotiation, plan design audit and cost modeling, consumer driven health plans linked to HSA’s and/or HRA’s, contribution and alternative funding strategies, and analysis of claims history and utilization trends. We offer independent impartial advice and put our clients’ interests first.

Consulting and Brokerage Services include:
Group Medical
Group Dental
Group Life
Group Disability
Group Rx
Flexible Spending Accounts
COBRA
Health Reimbursement Arrangements
Health Savings Accounts
Financial Analysis, Forecasting
Ongoing consultation on design, vendor selection, strategic planning
Benchmarking and Peer Group analysis
Employee communications, benefits committee meetings
Voluntary Benefit Strategies (long term care, critical illness)
Employee Assistance Plans
Integrated Health Risk Management

Compensation
NWC provides a full range of compensation consulting services, and we have developed a broad range of programs for higher education administrators, faculty and support staff, as well as health care professionals. Our services include job evaluation and classification, development of market driven salary structures, analysis of internal equity and market competitiveness, development of pay processes and policies, and creation of merit and bonus pay programs.

We provide added value to our higher education clients by drawing on a growing knowledge-base of salary data and compensation practices, and have conducted dedicated salary studies for a number of job descriptions.

Retirement Plans 
NWC supports retirement plan reviews and coordinates the unification of faculty and staff retirement plans at several colleges and universities. We also help clients develop and implement strategies to move from defined benefit to defined contribution plans.

Early Retirement Plans 
The key to a cost effective early retirement plan is a careful analysis of retirement patterns and demographics. Age discrimination, retirement, and tax laws applicable to early retirement plans are complex. With expert knowledge, meticulous analysis and creative design we have help implement cost effective early retirement plans for our clients.

Employee Relations
Our consultants help higher education and other non-profit clients successfully handle complicated faculty and staff relations problems—including discipline and discharge, sexual harassment, tenure disputes, discrimination complaints, and reductions in staff. More importantly, we provide training and guidance that help our clients avoid these problems.

Communications
Communicating changes effectively and succinctly is critical to fostering acceptance and is central to our approach. Unless plan documents and communications are comprehensible, benefits and compensation programs are not appreciated. We prepare written communications that are understandable and compliant. We are available to assist at group meetings and interact with employees to explain changes and assist with open enrollments.

Staffing, Workload and Organizational effectiveness 
We conduct audits of operational departments to identify process and organizational issues related to poor performance and workload imbalance. Dedicated studies we have conducted have allowed clients to assess comparative staffing levels in functional areas among peer organizations.