The cost of employee benefits is a significant dollar amount for employers. Yet many employees don't utilize their benefits package to their full advantage. So how can you maximize your employee benefits? 401(k) plans, flexible spending accounts and health insurance are 3 benefits that most employers offer. Here's how to get the most out of them.

401(k)
I know people struggle with putting money away for retirement. Employees often say they can't afford to get a smaller paycheck by putting a higher percentage into their 401(k). What they don't realize is the tax advantage they are missing out on. For example, if you contribute $10,000 and you make $50,000 a year, you only pay tax on $40,000, not $50,000. So the tax savings is giving you back some money to make up for that $10,000 contribution (how much depends on what tax bracket you are in). Having a portion of your salary withheld from each paycheck and deposited into a tax-deferred retirement savings account is generally a good idea even without an employer match. But if your company matches the money you save, it's like free money. Even if you invest a small amount now, it can become a substantial asset with the passage of 30 or 40 years.

Flexible Spending Accounts
Under a flexible spending account, you direct your employer to withhold extra money every pay period on a pre-tax basis. That money is then available to you to pay for medical bills that are not reimbursed by insurance or day care costs you incur while you work. Since the money deducted from your paycheck comes out before you pay taxes, you will save the amount of money your taxes would have cost you. And as long as you use the money on qualifying expenses, you never have to pay taxes on it. One heads up: this is a "use it or lose it" account. Be sure to estimate carefully the amount you set aside in your FSA. You want to deposit as much money as possible to get the biggest tax break, but you want to be sure you don't deposit extra so you won't lose any money.

Health Insurance
It's important to learn how your group insurance plan works. Do you have an HMO, PPO, POS? Take the time to learn about your plan and how you can get the biggest benefits. For example, if you have a PPO plan, it works like this: The insurance company or the plan administrator will approach doctors and hospitals to be in their PPO directory. The providing doctors agree to provide services for a reduced fee. And doctors are willing to take that discount because they expect they will increase their patient traffic. It's not like an HMO where you have a gatekeeper who directs all your services. You can go to any PPO doctor at any time. PPO plans are designed to provide better benefits for those who use the PPO doctors. You may have 80% coverage, for example, as long as you visit a PPO doctor, whereas you may only have 60% coverage using a non-PPO provider. And remember, with the PPO doctor you are paying 20% of the discounted price. With a non-PPO doctor you are paying 40% of the full retail price. It's a huge difference. Go out of your way to use PPO doctors whenever possible. Remember, it is your responsibility to confirm with the doctor that they still have a PPO contract with your doctor. Do this and you won't be surprised by a big bill.

What it means to me to know the mission is to have a clear understanding of how my work will be used by the end users to accomplish their goals.

Individuals across the team should be able to make this connection. The architect creating a systems view model should be able to describe how end users will use the various systems. Programmers should be able to describe what the user will be dealing with when an alert is displayed. Systems Administrators should be able to pinpoint what job will be harder for a user if a component goes down.

The more direct the tie to the end user across the team, the better the decision-making process will be and the better the chance of success.

The project team must build trust and credibility early by demonstrating understanding and good decision making directly related to the mission.

The worst scenario for the client, the company, and the mission is to have executed the contract flawlessly and have a result that the end users just don't find to be valuable.

To build successful services in today's market, you need broad capabilities beyond one technology discipline.

With today's mobile phones and tablet computers having the capability to play and record video, offer high speed connectivity, provide modern web browsing and apps for games and productivity, it is clear how important technology convergence is to both disrupting the technology industry's platforms (such as the desktop) and impacting the lives of millions of people in order to get more out of network-based services.

While advances towards net-centric systems have been steady for decades, we continue to see the world moving toward IP-based systems and replacing analog or proprietary protocols. For example, we have been designing telecommunication systems that provide Voice-over-IP (VoIP) services for large-scale customer deployments and fall-back to analog systems in cases where the pure VoIP client-to-provider IP networks experience failures.

The interesting aspect of the convergence toward IP is while standard protocols such as IP lower costs, they also have new considerations and trade-offs such as security, performance and information quality. Before, end customers were not necessarily directly exposed to worldwide potential threats with a phone.

With VoIP phones having an IP address, the concerns that we have with the data networks are now the concerns for the voice networks as well. Additionally, since the PSTN network was built for a more unified purpose, letting one person speak to another, not multiple competing purposes, call quality was easier to control since fewer resources were competing for the same bandwidth.

As modern network, software and hardware platforms subsume the old models of communication and previous types of systems, we believe that the need to engineer systems that transform old systems into new ones will require the type of broad capabilities and knowledge we offer our customers. It will take those able to solve these complex and transformative problems to change the services we rely on today into the ones we will rely on tomorrow.

One lesson that I have learned over the years is that team success comes from everyone (or at a minimum all the key players) knowing how they contribute to the overall objective.

A lesson I continue to collect, learn, lose sight of, and then learn again is that clearly understanding and stating your objective is critical and often overlooked.

While trying to empower teammates to make good decisions, I have had conversations that ended up back to the basic question my kids love to ask: Why?

Why did you decide to do this? OK, why is that important? OK, why does this help the program? OK, why is that important to the user? OK, why is that important to the mission?

This is a little extreme, but unless you can tie this piece of code, this requirement, this test case, and this deployment process to how that effort helps fulfill the mission, the daily decisions made by each team member may or may not help the team progress toward the goal.

Too often the daily grind drives us to confuse the how for the why. As an example, this particular feature's reason for being is not simply to allow a user to see an item as higher priority in their list. This particular feature is to help make the community safer. It helps make the community safer by allowing the user to see critical items first.

Confusing the how for the why leads to decisions being made for the sake of the how, not the sake of the why, and quickly leads the effort astray.

A departing manager once told me that the key to success is laser focused vision. The way to achieve that laser focus is to ensure each team member understands the mission's objective and how their day-to-day activities facilitate that objective.

As things become confusing, complicated, or convoluted, it is best to get back to basics and ask yourself and your team, "Why?"

How do you attract high quality employees when you are a small company? This is the question we face all the time. As a small growing company, how can we stand out to attract the best talent? As with all small businesses, we face many challenges in doing business - attracting good people with limited resources is just one of those challenges, mostly because people believe that employment with a small business equals the following things: lack of stability, lower salary, uncertainty, risk, job ambiguity and poor benefits. How can we overcome these perceptions and hire good, quality people who will share our mission and help us meet our objectives? First, it is helpful to understand what the company does and what we see as our customers' problem space.

Elluminates Software focuses on enterprise architecture, systems engineering and business analytics to help our customers be more informed, more prepared and able to meet their most pressing challenges, and therefore build systems that make a difference.

So what does that mean for our employees? Our mission for our employees is to:

- offer a positive, productive and collaborative work environment; and,
- allow each employee to grow, learn and excel at what they do; and,
- provide a place where integrity, honesty and the highest craftsmanship are paramount.

Let's focus on some of those negative perceptions people have of small businesses.

Lack of stability - Job stability seems to be a concern with everyone in today's economy, whether the job is with a small or a large company. Elluminates Software has been around since 2003. Since our founding, we have had a steady stream of ever larger and more complex projects and have many more projects pending. Also, our strategy is to go after positions that focus on the company's core strengths. Our strategy is not to try to fill positions that might make us money but aren't related to our core business. By using this strategy we hope that we can continually use that person's expertise in other projects around the company.

Lower salary - Our compensation strategy is to hire at market level, so we are never out of the competition's range. We benchmark our salaries against other companies and make sure we are offering a competitive salary. We also have a bonus structure for performance and new business opportunities.

Poor benefits - When I started working for Elluminates Software, the company only offered a 401(k) plan. Now I don't think you could tell our benefits summary from a large company's. We have a full benefits offering including health insurance, long- and short-term disability insurance, life insurance and flexible spending accounts. Not to mention an employee referral bonus plan, tuition reimbursement, paid time-off and flexible working arrangements.

Job ambiguity - Our strategy is to hire well and keep our employees motivated and focused. Employees in small businesses often have to play more than one role. For a technical person, this often means managing people or projects. They may not want to do this or have any experience doing this. It's important to communicate this to a prospective employee, as well as communicate what the company will do to help them be successful in that role. Also, it's important to us to keep our employees interested in their work. Research shows that most people's job satisfaction is tied to the interest they have in their work, not salary or benefits.

On the flip side, there are some negative aspects to working in a large company. How can you stand out in a large company? How can you achieve job satisfaction in a large company, where you can be just another faceless employee? There are some extremely appealing aspects to working at a small business. You can actually affect change. You can play a key role in daily operations. You are a vital part of the team. At Elluminates Software you are not just another employee.