We celebrated our latest product release with a cake that represents all things Alaska!

If you’re a follower of our press release RSS feed, you’ve probably noticed we’re already off to a busy week! On Monday, we announced Ray Bingham as our new board chairman. A managing director of private equity firm General Atlantic, Ray has focused his career on helping innovators build their businesses and he’s well-suited to guide TriNet’s services to help our client base of emerging growth companies be successful in their highly competitive markets. We followed up that news on Tuesday with our quarterly HR trends report, where a majority of small business owners shared plans to ramp up the hiring in 2010. And today, we announced the launch of our winter release of products, which includes three tools that enable small business owners to position themselves for growth. They are:

• Benchmarking Dashboards
  Understand organizational performance, tracking your business practices against your peers to maximize your competitive positioning
• Health & Wellness
  Promote a healthy lifestyle for employees and their families, increasing morale and productivity while reducing healthcare costs
• Workplace Safety
  Create a safer workplace for employees while decreasing injury-related costs and legal and regulatory risks

The dashboards use current data to help you investigate HR metrics such as hiring, turnover, compensation (in terms of base, bonus and benefits) and then provides prescriptive advice based on the results.

Health & Wellness programs are typically only available to large programs, so it’s exciting to be able to offer these to small businesses. They’re personalized too, to the employee; there’s six-week learning modules cover topics such as nutrition, exercise and heart disease prevention, and if an employee has additional questions, there’s access to experts. The American Journal of Preventative Medicine sees a return of $3-$6 for every $1 investment into programs like these… because not only do medical costs go down; employers also see reductions in absenteeism, worker’s comp claims, short-term disability claims. And there’s potential legislation out there that would offer tax credits to companies that implement these programs.

Did you know that 1 in 20 workers suffer a work accident in one year? That’s according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ouch! Training employees on safe work practices not only protects your employees, but it helps you manage your financial position, ensure compliance, reduce indirect costs and builds a safety-conscious culture.

These quarterly releases are foundational to our company, as they demonstrate our commitment to helping our clients realize their ambitions, but this release steps it up a notch. In the past, our product releases has been focused on introducing new strategic services, but today’s news is about strengthening our core offering; our clients have access to these new products as part of their standard service package. So if you’re a client, dive on in (just like we did with the pictured cake… yummy)!