Ready to get out of town for a few days?  Not quite up for the planning hassle? Vacation Wellness™ makes easy work out of vacation planning, by giving employee members access to over 400 professionally-planned vacations packages every year, at discounts of up to 30% to 70%.  Employees just log in to their member site, choose their vacation package, click, order, and done.  No surfing between spa resort sites, travel booking engines, or sketchy “book now or else!” sites. There are plenty of other vacation packages available on the internet, but each comes with its own set of questions:  Who planned the vacation packages? What does the spa resort really look like?  When they say “all inclusive vacations,” what do they really mean? Vacation packages available through the Vacation Wellness™ Employee Benefit Program help you book your spa resort or all inclusive vacations with confidence.  Each trip is planned by a professional travel agent, whose name and email address are right on the booking page.  And all of the fine print pertaining to your vacation package is visible right up front, prior to booking.  On many Vacation Wellness™ excursions, and on all Vacation Wellness™ Luxury Vacations, an in-person host is provided at your destination to help you book spa retreats, excursions, luxury outings, sightseeing tours, and mini-trips.  No surprises and no hassles. Why would your employer offer such a program?  Because it’s good for business!  Watch a short video to see how Vacation Wellness™ improves employee quality of life while enhancing company profitability. We’ll see you on the ... Read More

How does the VacationWellness™ employee benefit work? It’s an easy way to enjoy professionally-planned, 4-star and 5-star destination vacations, with no planning hassle and discounts up to 70%. Just log in to your personal member site, choose from over 400 professionally planned 4- and 5-star destination vacations, click to order, and you’re done.  Pack your bags, grab the camera, and go enjoy! We have an army of travel agents who love to find amazing discounts.  And we have serious buying power.  We pass that savings on to you! Ask your Human Resources department for Vacation Wellness™, the one-of-a-kind employee benefit offered by Zoescent. Vacations are now easy and affordable. Watch a short ... Read More

It’s easy. Vacations help businesses reduce healthcare costs.  Not just a little.  A lot.  Learn more in a white paper here. Vacations help businesses keep employees happy and loyal.  Learn how vacations reduce employee turnover. But two out of three employees didn’t take all of their vacation time last year.  See a short video on how that cost businesses $532 billion last year alone. Vacation Wellness™ to the rescue. It’s a simple employee benefit that does three things: Demonstrates that businesses care about employee life balance. Provides employees access to over 400 professionally-planned vacations to 4-star and 5-star destinations every year.  Click.  Order.  No planning hassle. Saves employees up to 70% on each vacation! Easy.  Effective.  Affordable. Learn more about vacation ... Read More

For many in the human resources profession, the holiday season heralds more than just good tidings. It also rings in the start of planning for the spring employee benefits program open enrollment season. So human resources employee benefits folks often have a full plate to go along with their full stockings. The game has changed quite a bit this year with the passing of new healthcare legislation. Employee healthcare costs are rising at even steeper rates (12% per year, on average, for the last five years. Read more here), forcing some companies to drop medical benefits entirely from their employee benefit packages. Hopefully yours isn’t among them, as robust employee benefits related to health/wellness always top of the list of best practices for employee retention. Because healthcare costs are rising at four times the average inflation rate over the past five years, with an aging and increasingly overweight and under-active employee population, benefits managers are looking for ways to reduce healthcare demand.  Employee wellness benefit programs are a rapidly growing market segment as a result.  Many employers are relatively inexperienced with employee health and wellness programs, and when combined with the wide variety of wellness benefits available today, it can be a confusing environment.  There’s no shortage of employee wellness program ideas, but selecting the right suite of benefits for your employee pool can be challenging. The best advice is this:  target the highest healthcare cost drivers first.  That may sound obvious, but relatively few companies have it quite right when it comes to implementing employee wellness benefit programs that actually have an impact on the most important factors adding to healthcare costs. What are those factors?  Most employee benefits related to health and wellness focus on things like obesity, smoking, hypertension, and abnormal blood sugar levels.  It’s true that those conditions do contribute to rising healthcare costs.  But they don’t contribute nearly as much as most people think, and they don’t even come close to matching the two biggest contributors to rising health insurance costs:  stress and depression. Stress contributes to all five leading causes of employee death, and costs businesses over $300 billion every year (watch the 2-minute video below for more).  Over one million employees miss work every day due to a stress-related condition, and three out of four employees call their jobs either “stressful” or “very stressful.”  Burnout is a very real danger, and stress contributes to rising employee turnover rates (read more in an employee turnover white paper here). Depression is even more expensive than a heart attack, and costs twice as much as diabetes, three times more than employee obesity, four times more than smoking, and six times more than high blood pressure.  Those are surprising figures. It’s clear that unless your employee wellness benefit programs are designed to reduce employee stress and depression risks, you’re probably paying more in healthcare expenses than you should.  There’s significant research that supports a very inexpensive but highly effective stress and depression mitigation program that doesn’t suffer from the usual ERISA and GINA regulatory red tape:  Vacation Wellness™.  The premise is simple.  Vacation Wellness™ allows employee members to take 4- and 5-star destination vacations at up to 70% percent discounts.  The program offers over 400 trips per year, each trip planned by professional travel agents, available for employee members to click and order online at significant discounts over the next-best online price. How can vacations possibly help control rising healthcare costs?  The research is clear: Men who vacation regularly are at 32% lower risk of heart attack. Women who vacation regularly are 53% less likely to suffer a heart attack. Regular vacationers are 2 to 3 times less likely to suffer from depression. Employees who take yearly vacations (or more frequent) are 8 times less likely to die prematurely. Here’s another gift under the benefits tree:  popular employee wellness programs are a powerful retention tool.  Among employees who have a positive impression of your wellness benefits, 64% will remain with your company for the next five years or more (more on benefits and best practices for employee retention here).  That’s another compelling reason to look closely at Vacation Wellness™ and other highly popular employee wellness programs, as it can cost upwards of three times the position’s annual salary and benefits cost to replace a departing employee. There’s plenty to consider as you get ready for next year’s open enrollment process.  But not all the news is bad.  While the cost of “sick care” is rising precipitously, it’s never been easier to find affordable prevention for the two most ominous healthcare expenses. So we’ll see you on the beach?  We’re sure Santa will know where to find you… Happy ... Read More

There’s a very expensive ailment plaguing businesses. It’s difficult to diagnose, and even more difficult to cure. There’s no pill, procedure, surgery, or diet that can cure it. And it affects a whopping 77% of employees at one point or another. It’s burnout. Talent Management’s Lois Melbourne provides a few employee burnout recognition clues, including: Avoiding/skipping meetings Absenteeism Irritability Lack of attention to details Once it affects a few employees, the malaise can spread faster than the flu, leading to adverse organizational trends such as higher voluntary turnover, increased absenteeism, and productivity losses.  Those are business killers, particularly in the shaky post-recession economy.  The hidden costs associated with voluntary turnover alone can reach crippling proportions – for example, the average 100-person IT firm spends in excess of $4M per year in direct replacement costs and lost productivity (view our extensive turnover research here). Prevention is clearly preferable to cure, but the problem is widespread.  Stress is a major contributor to employee burnout, and three out of four employees describe their job as either “stressful” or “very stressful.” While employees’ direct supervisors are the first line of defense against burnout, and effective leadership goes a long way toward alleviating the problem (read more here), there is something that human resources employee benefits folks can do to help the team avoid the negative consequences of burnout. Help employees take vacations. Three out of four executives view vacations as an important tool in burnout prevention.  Yet two out of three American employees gave back vacation days last year, and 43% have no vacation plans for this year. Why? Three reasons: Employees need help affording vacations. Employees don’t relish the hassle of planning vacations. Employees don’t believe that management really wants them to take vacations. Here’s where the employee benefits folks come in, with a program called Vacation Wellness™ (watch a short video here).  It’s designed to remove all three barriers to the healthy practice of employee vacations. More than just avoiding burnout, regular destination vacations also play a key role in overall employee health, which can give your employee health and wellness programs a boost.  It seems almost too simple to work, but the research shows that Regular vacationers are up to three times less likely to suffer depression, the most expensive employee health problem. Regular male vacationers are up to 32% less likely to suffer heart attack, and female vacationers are up to 53% less likely to have heart problems.  Heart disease is the second-costliest acute employee healthcare issue. Regular vacationers are eight times less likely to suffer premature morbidity. Isn’t it fantastic to have a bucketful of legitimate business reasons to take vacations?  Just make sure you’re providing your employees the best opportunity to get away.  It’s not the silver bullet for burnout, but it’s darn ... Read More

We’re fortunate to serve a number of healthcare providers, which is interesting for two reasons. First, healthcare professionals understand the benefits of stress reduction. That’s not a surprise, as the medical research on the link between stress and adverse health outcomes is impressive and growing by the month (download a white paper here).  Stress plays a significant role in all five leading causes of employee death, and costs American businesses over $300 billion every year.  It makes sense that human resources employee benefits teams in the healthcare field would be at the vanguard of employee stress mitigation as business strategy. The second important point is that the healthcare field is a high-stress environment. Employee wellness programs (VacationWellness™ among them) and other stress mitigation efforts are gaining traction exceptionally quickly due the pressure and stress inherent to many careers in the healthcare industry.  Several factors contribute: Healthcare professionals often work long hours, which is a double-whammy.  Long days at work increase fatigue, which lowers immune function and mental stressor coping capacity.  Long days at work also represent the loss of opportunity to spend time in other valuable life pursuits, such as taking care of household needs, spending time with family and friends, exercising, and resting.  The cumulative effect elevates stress levels. Healthcare professionals have enormous emotional investment in their work. Many of us consider our work to be important, and strive to be at our best while performing our jobs, but emotional and cognitive work investment are at a completely different level for many in the healthcare field.  Those providing patient care are often witness to tragedy, suffering, pain, and struggle, and many see families during their most desperate hours.  Hands-on providers are participants in both miracle and tragedy, an emotional roller-coaster with fulfilling highs and devastating lows.  The emotional and mental strain has a very real physical side effect in the form of stress and its many associated maladies. Healthcare professionals work irregular schedules. Patient care is often a 24/7/365 business, requiring providers to work ever-changing hours that often conflict with their natural sleep schedules.  Chronic and acute sleep deprivation reduce coping skills, decrease immune system function, hamper critical thinking and reaction times, and lead to greater aggregate and acute stress. Healthcare professionals are subject to increasing bureaucratic encumbrances. The demands of healthcare legislation, insurance documentation, and haggling with insurance companies over payment for services and procedures, have all added exponential complexity to the professional environment over the past several years, and new medical records requirements promise to provide even more red tape.  Bureaucracy diminishes individual effectiveness, which increases employee stress levels. Human Resources professionals in the healthcare field often see the effects of employee stress in the form of increased workforce turnover, higher absentee rates, increased accidents, greater interpersonal conflicts at work, more employee family difficulties, and even elevated suicide rates.  It’s a challenging environment, and looking after healthcare professionals takes significant effort. Through our interaction with a large number of hospital HR executives, we’ve compiled a list of employee stress reduction best practices to help: Make time off mandatory. Don’t allow healthcare professionals to bank their vacation days.  Force them to get away from work, leave the cell phone and pager behind, and unwind.  As you might have guessed, Vacation Wellness™ can help them make the most of their time away, but the important point is that employees need to take dedicated time to relax.  One to two weeks consecutively is recommended. Offer a robust wellness suite. Healthy behaviors, such as diet, exercise, smoking cessation, talking with professional counselors about difficult life issues, etc., all serve to reduce stress, lower risk of disease, and reduce likelihood of burnout and depression. Stabilize employee work schedules. This is not always possible, but to minimize physiological stressors, employees should not be forced to switch frequently between day, mid-, and night shifts.  A rotation is often required in order to “share the pain” of late night work shifts, but the rotation should last long enough for employees to recover from the change to a new schedule.  One month should be considered the bare minimum. Remain vigilant for adverse signs of stress. Missed work or tardiness, errors while on the job, irritability, difficulty with coworkers, family difficulties, increased smoking or alcohol consumption, or significant changes in diet and mood can all provide clues to an increased stress condition.  Intervene early. Helping the healers is a tough job, but a concerted effort to reduce employee stress through robust employee health and wellness programs, EAP offerings, and old-fashioned care and concern, can go a long way toward keeping your healthcare providers healthy and ... Read More

An existential mind-bender? A quantum riddle? Can an employee wellness program really be an incentive for another health and wellness program? When the incentive is Vacation Wellness™, the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ Let’s set aside, for a moment, the substantial debate on the true efficacy of incentives as agents of meaningful employee health and wellness behavioral change. It is a significant debate (peek at the Employee Wellness Network, as well as LinkedIN discussions here and here), and opinions vary widely on the degree to which employee wellness programs ought to rely on incentives to elicit desired employee health behavior. On one hand, non-incentivized traditional employee health and wellness programs achieve historically poor employee participation rates – in the single digits for smoking cessation, obesity management, and chronic disease symptom alleviation (see our white paper for more in-depth analysis) – so employee wellness benefit program managers feel compelled to improve participation rates through all means available. On the other hand, incentives for employee wellness program participation have very mixed results, with relatively low average meaningful participation rate increases. Buck Consultants report that despite incentives, only 16% of executives consider their current employee wellness initiatives to be “effective” or “very effective.” IncentOne recently published a research review that examined the relationship between incentive dollar amount and meaningful employee participation via regression analysis of numerous employee wellness program studies published over the years. While the regression line sloped gently up and right (ie, spending more on incentives generally generated more participation), the statistical correlation was horrible – only 37%. For those lucky enough not to have suffered through multiple engineering degrees, that means the various incentivized employee wellness program results that IncentOne studied were all over the map. In other words, many programs without incentives performed better than other programs with incentives. SO, as an employee wellness benefit program manager, you have an important question to answer: should we incorporate incentives into our particular employee health and wellness program? The wellness community doesn’t have a definitive answer for you just yet, so you’ll have to use your best judgment. More than anything else, a successful employee wellness program depends on your leadership and management, and on your specific employee wellness offering itself. However, if you do choose to incentivize employee participation in your traditional wellness program (and by “traditional wellness,” I’m referring to programs that incorporate HRAs, diet and exercise support, smoking cessation, etc), it only makes sense to use an incentive that furthers your employee wellness objectives. Here’s why Vacation Wellness works extremely well to help advance your employee wellness program goals: It’s an effective wellness program in its own right. A large employer with 1,800 employees reduced their healthcare claim expenses by over $2M annually (over 25%) using a Vacation Wellness solution. It enjoys very high organic participation rates – in excess of 89% – because you don’t have to twist your employees’ arms to get them to take premium destination vacations at 30% to 70% discounts. See example employee vacations here. Because of its popularity with employees, Vacation Wellness is a highly effective employee retention technique. By reducing employee turnover rates by just 20%, the average 100-employee professional services firm can save over $875K per year. Learn more about employee retention by reading our employee turnover white paper. Vacation Wellness targets stress and depression directly. Together, stress and depression add 146% to your annual healthcare expenditure – by far the costliest employee health problem (yes, significantly costlier than heart attacks. But read on…). Vacation Wellness reduces heart attack risk. Regular vacationers are 32% (male) and 53% (female) less likely to suffer heart attacks (learn more here). Vacations are the third most-requested employee benefit, behind professional education opportunities and flexible work hours. So in this unique circumstance, it is possible to use a high-value employee wellness benefit as an incentive for your other, less popular employee health and wellness programs. “Great idea. How much does it cost?” You read our minds. We’ve put together an instant price quote engine that helps you compare costs to potential savings and returns on your Vacation Wellness investment. Prepare to be pleasantly ... Read More

Not to step on anybody’s toes, but seriously – this is stress management?!? I won’t name the source, but this tripe is sold and billed as “stress management” in someone’s world. Employees are overworked, underpaid, have had their benefits slashed, and feel relationship and financial pressures at home, and they’re supposed to “stand up and stretch” to relieve stress? Thanks, boss. Instead of patronizing your workforce, how about doing something about stress? No wonder there’s an employee turnover rate crisis developing. If this is the kind of crap that’s passing for stress relief programs at your company, you’re in for a nasty surprise as the economic recovery unfolds. Why is an effective stress management program necessary and essential to controlling employee healthcare expenses and employee turnover rates? Wolff states it pretty well: The stress accruing from a situation is based in large part on the way the affected subject perceives it: perception depends upon a multiplicity of factors including the genetic equipment, basic individual needs and longings, earlier conditioning influences, and a host of life experiences and cultural pressures. In other words, your employees’ perception of their life and work situation is a function of their previous experiences in life in general, but more importantly, their experiences with you as their employer in particular. The way your employees view their circumstances determines the impact of stressful situations on their health and wellness – and hence, on the degree of healthcare, absentee, presentee, and employee turnover costs your business bears. Perceived stress is not an abstract thing. It produces a systemic physiological response encompassing thinking patterns, hormones, muscles, arteries, joints, and internal organs. Wolff’s research suggests stress manifests changes in all of these physiological and mental processes: Appetite and digestion Mental alertness and cognitive function Arterial constriction, reduced renal (kidney) function, and hypertension Skin health Musculoskeletal health Pulmonary function Mental framework and expectation for the quality of the future (ie, positive or negative life outlook) Those are just the processes affected by an employee’s stress reaction to life stimuli. The outcome of repeated stress reactions is often pathological, and deadly. The six leading causes of death – widely considered preventable with appropriate behavioral choices – have been correlated to stress: Heart disease Cancer Stroke Lower respiratory disease (many smoking-induced) Accidents (mental distraction-induced) Diabetes Clearly, your employee benefits related to health/wellness must not only account for stress, but be designed around stress mitigation. Unfortunately, few employee wellness programs target stress directly, and instead struggle to target the side effects of stress, which manifest themselves in a litany of physiological indicators (blood pressure, blood cholesterol, destructive life habits like smoking and alcohol abuse, obesity, etc). Most employee wellness benefits attempt to close the barn door after the horse has left. So, what works? Certainly not a collection of trite, manipulative “Dudley Doright” posters. Among the most effective mechanisms for reducing the stress reaction to life stimuli is affording the opportunity to gain physical and mental distance from the daily routine. Taking time away from work, and away from the everyday home environment as well, gives employees the opportunity to gain perspective on life situations, restore primary relationships, improve physical health, establish new, healthier life habits, and reduce the risk of depression (by up to three times!) and burnout. There’s a term for what I’ve just described: wellness travel in general, and Vacation Wellness™ in particular. Why do you need a program to get your employees to take destination vacations? Because two out of three employees haven’t taken a vacation in over a year, and 43% have no plans to take a vacation this year. American employees leave a full third of their allotted vacation days on the table, which ends up costing American businesses over $532B every year. Why? Three reasons: Employees don’t believe they can afford a vacation Vacations are difficult and time-consuming to plan Employees don’t believe their employers want them to take any time off. Your employees need you to provide a vacation wellness benefit that allows them to take professionally planned premium destination vacations at up to 70% discounts, because doing so removes all three obstacles to the healthy practice of taking regular destination vacations. Sounds great in principle, but how does it work? See an example here. And calculate your approximate business savings here. Then get a quote here. Or have your questions answered here. In the meantime, tear down those patronizing ... Read More

We’re bombarded with figures, statistics, numbers, and facts. If you’ve followed our blogs, read our white papers, viewed our Vacation Wellness™ Employee Benefit Program fact sheet, or used our business savings calculator (thanks, by the way!), you’ve undoubtedly observed that we love numbers. They help us answer important business and life questions: when? how often? how much? how many? how far? how expensive? how profitable? They’re a way for us to answer the real underlying question, which is always some form of “Is this particular issue important enough for me to pay attention?” But there’s an art to the science. Not all numbers are created equal. Just because someone studied it doesn’t mean you should pay any attention to it. Many of the “gee whiz” statistics that Southwest Airlines’ inflight magazine “Spirit” quotes are entertaining — did you know that Vanna White claps 720 times per Wheel of Fortune episode? Me neither. I wonder what penguin fell off the island in to make room for that little tidbit — but have no redeeming pragmatic value. Other statistics, however, prove to be very important after just a little more digging. Here’s an example: Americans drink 146 billion cups of coffee every year, which is just a smidge over 400 million cups per day (yep – same inflight magazine. Phoenix to Denver, in case you’re wondering). Interesting? Maybe. Important? Not so far, unless you’re in the coffee business. But here’s something that might make you sit up and take notice: In a Kaiser Permanente study, people who drank four or more cups of coffee per day were at 18% lower risk of hospitalization for heart arrhythmia. Mount Sinai researchers discovered that people who drank three or four cups of coffee a day were 25% less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes. If your business has employees (most do), those are numbers you probably do care about, because of these numbers: American businesses spend 16.5% of the gross domestic product on employee healthcare. Employee healthcare costs have risen by 12% every year over the past five years. The average employee benefits manager spends $13,000 per year per employee on healthcare costs. Hewitt Associates predict that by 2019, healthcare costs could exceed $28,500 per employee every year. Diabetes adds 35% per year to the average employee healthcare cost. Heart disease events cost an average of $8,523 per episode, and consume an average of 7.5 workdays. Suddenly, thanks to a few numbers helping us shed light on a relationship we didn’t know existed, the coffee maker in the employee lounge doesn’t look nearly as much like a creature comfort, and starts to look much more like a strategic employee health and wellness investment. There’s a similarly surprising, and some would say unlikely, set of data proving that wellness travel and employee vacations are an inexpensive but indispensable method to help control rising employee healthcare costs, reduce employee turnover rates, and improve employee engagement and motivation. You’ve seen all of these statistics running around our website and white papers, and probably already knew many of them anyway, but they paint such a great picture of an elegant solution to a common set of business problems that I can’t help but repeat them here: Traditional employee health and wellness programs focus on body fat, smoking, blood pressure, and cholesterol – four ailments that add only 20% or less to your annual employee healthcare cost bill. Without “incentives” (some would say “bribery”), those traditional employee wellness programs enjoy single-digit employee participation rates. Stress and depression, on the other hand, add 46% and 70% to your annual healthcare cost burden. Present together at the same time, they add 147% – costing upwards of $30,000 per year, per employee. Depressed employees’ short-term disability leave costs three to five times more than a control group. Vacation Wellness™ targets stress and depression directly, lowering the risk of employee depression by up to 300%. Regular destination vacationers are 32% (men) and 53% (women) less likely to have a heart attack. Three out of four workers describe their jobs as “stressful” or “very stressful” – alarming when you consider that stress has been linked repeatedly to the top six causes of death. A Duke University Medical School article describes vacations and wellness travel as a simple but necessary method to reduce stress, lower burnout risk, improve coping mechanisms, and restore important relationships. 82% of surveyed executives agree that vacations improve employee engagement and productivity. Vacation Wellness is a strategic employee retention program – essential when you consider that the average 100-person IT firm can save nearly $875,000 every year by reducing their employee turnover rates just 20%. I could go on (and I often do!), but that’s probably enough for now… In the meantime, those are numbers you can take to the ... Read More

There’s quite a buzz about wellness travel as an effective and affordable employee wellness benefit program (get a detailed fact sheet here). Many businesses are adding wellness vacation options to their employee benefit plans to leverage the surprising business results that arise from employees taking regular destination vacations. The research shows that vacations Reduce healthcare cost Lower heart attack and depression risk Reduce employee stress Improve workforce turnover Enhance worker productivity So how do you get the most out of a wellness travel employee benefit plan? Make sure that it provides a cost shelter against rising travel costs. Why is that important? Two words: baby boomers. New York Life reports that one baby boomer will retire every 8 seconds for the next 18 years, adding 10,800 new retirees every day. The same market force that made millionaires out of health club owners in the 80’s, mutual fund managers in the 90’s, and mortgage bankers in the 2000’s, will drive unprecedented volume into two major market sectors: healthcare and travel. We’ve already detailed the boomer impact on healthcare costs, and there probably isn’t anyone alive who believes that cost increases in this sector will do anything but accelerate. The boomers are having the same effect on the travel industry. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates the travel industry at $8 trillion annually – with an increase of over $1 trillion last year alone, during what many have started calling the “Great Recession.” Travel grew by the size of the entire telecommunications industry last year. There are currently 44 cruise ships under construction – in addition to the 81 new cruise ships the industry added over the previous seven years. Why? Boomers. Everywhere Baby Boomers spend their money, prices inevitably increase. It’s Econ 101. That’s why your employees need a budget wellness vacation plan in order for your business to reap the positive business benefits of employee vacations. Through industry-unique relationships, employee members’ wellness travel costs are 1/3 to 2/3 less than market average. That’s an important advantage – and a best practice for employee retention, by the way – for employers who see the value in investing in the health and productivity of their workforce. The research shows that wellness travel really isn’t an option, it’s a necessity. Your business needs your employees to take wellness vacations. And your employees need a cost shelter to keep wellness vacations within their budget as the Boomer Factor continues to drive travel prices through the ... Read More