We Pay 100% of Our Employees' Healthcare. Here's Why.

12/27/2021
by Logan P.

Yes, you read that right. Instrumart pays for 100% of our 60+ employees’ health care–for them and their families. No premium payments, no co-pays, no deductibles. Our employees pay $0.00 for medical expenses. For us, the “how” is less important than the “why.” As a distributor for over 150 brands of industrial instrumentation, we sell to over 10,000 active customers per year. It can be very easy to “follow the money,” but we prefer to follow our mission and do the right thing.

Header image with text 'take good care of your employees'.

Take Good Care of Your Employees

Our President, Brian Leffler, shared his insight in a 2016 article by the Burlington Free Press: “Unless you can do all this work yourself, there's no way your company is going to succeed unless other people can carry out your mission ….A lot of people say you have to have a customer-focused company. I don't believe in that. I like to have an employee-focused company. They, in turn, take good care of customers because the company is taking good care of them."

Photo of Instrumart employees doing a goofy pose in holiday sweaters.

The story of the penny-pinching company is known all too well: the solution is oriented exclusively around profit. Employees then become cogs in a money-making machine. There is no time or resources available to build the culture of the company, so turnover becomes higher as better companies catch the eyes of the tired employee.

For example, we have over 20 applications engineers who work through complex scenarios with our customers to find the best solution. A phone call with a prospective customer can last well over an hour. A support call for a product we sold can last even longer than that. It takes a lot of time and energy to be an engineer, so how does Instrumart avoid burnout? We make sure our employees know that we care about them. That includes life inside and outside the workplace.

Header image with text 'reduce stress for your employees'.

Reduce Stress for Your Employees

When our employees can come to work happy and healthy, they are more likely to treat our customers better, be more productive, and contribute to a more positive work environment. Brian also acknowledged what happens when the opposite is true: “If you are negative towards your employees, they want to do the same thing to your customers. Make your company great so everyone is selling the company on their own."

Image of an Instrumart employee doing work at his desk.

In short, we understand that empowering people and trusting them means that we need to support the whole person–not just when they’re sitting in the office. It’s this approach that makes our excellent benefits package seem like a no-brainer, from our flexible time-off policy to our work-from-home hybrid schedule.

We know that our benefit packages cost a lot of money, but we also have very low employee turnover, low recruiting costs, low employee training costs, and we were voted the best company to work for in the State of Vermont in 2020.  Bottom line? We have happier employees who stay for longer and treat our customers better.

Want to Learn More About Instrumart?

See what’s happening Inside the Mart on our blog, read about what we stand for as a company, or meet the team.