If your company is like most, your employee benefit plan has become a bit flaccid over the past couple of years. Where’s the first place most execs cut costs when the going gets a bit rough? Yep. Benefits. What’s the big deal? Every other human resources employee benefits shop has had to do the same thing, right? It’s not like you’re alone in this “Great Recession.” But the times are changing, again. While you might not be feeling it quite yet, the recovery has begun. Small businesses – widely regarded as a reliable economic bellwether – have been hiring since mid-2009. The “jobless recovery” isn’t quite as jobless as many believe, which means two things: Your top talent is more valuable now than a year ago. You need to employ high-return employee retention techniques. Among the best practices for employee retention are so-called “employee retention wellness programs” – a unique double-duty category of employee benefit packages. The moniker comes from such programs’ pedigree as employee benefits related to health/wellness, designed to lower healthcare costs, improve productivity, and reduce workplace stress. But these programs also have exceptional value as employee retention techniques. This is due to three key factors: Nearly two out of three employees are quietly searching for jobs right now. You read correctly – almost 2/3 of your staff is peeking over the fence, looking for greener pastures, even during this time of scarcity. They know that top talent comes at a premium during a downturn. 20% of employees report that your employee benefit package is their most important stay-or-go decision consideration. If your staff doesn’t like your employee wellness benefit program, they are four times more likely to leave your company in the next year. The point is that you’re going to have to spend some money on your employee benefit plan -which must include a high-profile and high-value employee wellness program – to keep your turnover costs under control as the recovery takes shape. And when you spend money on benefits, you should employ the following five employee retention techniques to make sure you get the biggest bang for your benefits bucks: Go for employee benefits with high perceived value. Figure out what’s important to your employees, and give it to them (within reason). There is a small but meaningful list of benefits, like Vacation Wellness™, flex time, telecommute options, and education assistance, that are nearly universally appealing for employees. If you’re not yet a believer in employee health wellness programs, it’s time to get on board. Healthcare costs are out of control, which is reason enough, but effective employee wellness benefit programs are exceptional retention tools as well. Differentiate. Develop a unique employee benefit plan “selling point” that sets your offering apart from your competitors. If you’re coming from behind in this regard, you don’t need to add everything your competitors offer and then some, you just need to make sure that your additions are meaningful, valuable, timely, and have a high perceived value for your workforce. Foster employee work-life balance. The most effective employee wellness program ideas are those that give your workforce time, space, and permission to take care of themselves and their families, cultivate outside interests, and enjoy time away from work. Wellness travel is among the most cost-effective and attractive options in this category. Make your employee benefit package fun! Don’t inundate employees with drab, dry, complicated, esoteric benefits. OK, you can make the strong argument that many of the benefits necessities are always drab, dry, complicated and esoteric, but there’s no need to stop there. Add something that grabs their attention! Make them feel part of a community, and demonstrate that your company has gone the extra mile to look after their interests. The biggest takeaway is to consider employee wellness programs as employee retention plans in disguise. When you approach them strategically, you’ll reap twice the ... Read More

We’ve been writing for a while about RIGHT NOW being the time to get back on board with best practices for employee retention. Today’s edition of Talent Management, the flagship HR resource, picks up the torch in their lead story: The economic upturn is driving new job opportunities, but low levels of employee trust and engagement, even lower levels of entry-level recruitment, and increasing demand for executive talent have created a crossroads. Companies must rethink their talent management strategies if they hope to retain key talent and remain competitive in today’s marketplace. Why the “sudden” emphasis on employee retention techniques? Well, it’s really not so sudden. A retention crisis has been brewing for some time, for a few reasons: Perceptions of job scarcity have kept unsatisfied employees from leaving. Businesses have slashed employee benefit packages in a fire-sale approach to cost cutting, leaving otherwise happy employees anxious, unhappy, and far less loyal. Economic realities have made top talent even more valuable, not less valuable, as businesses posture to gain market share and seize new opportunity. Businesses have all but abandoned their employee retention plans, relying on high unemployment rates to keep talent on their team. Artificially low turnover numbers have lulled human resources employee benefits folks into a false sense of security. It doesn’t feel like a crisis now, so nobody’s doing much about employee retention. But turnover costs are among the highest expenses businesses face, and employee turnover is postured to return with a vengeance. In fact, there’s a school of thought that business’ lack of focus on employee retention plans will actually delay the economic recovery, as the enormous burden of replacing talent – costing up to three times as much as the position’s annual salary and benefits expense – comes home to roost. OK, so if it’s not already a problem, it’s about to become a nightmare. Where do you start? Employee benefits. 20% of workers surveyed reported that employee benefit packages matter most in their retention decision. Do five things: Prepare to spend some money on your employee benefit package. You can spend a little now, or you can spend gobs of cash in a few months. It’s an easy choice. Establish solid employee health and wellness programs. If your staff doesn’t like your employee wellness programs, they’re four times more likely to leave your company for a better offer. Ask your employees what employee benefit package options appeal to them. Then be prepared to implement as many of the most popular options as possible. Many won’t cost much money – telecommute options, flex time, etc are virtually free. Think out of the box. Implement a wellness travel benefit, such as Vacation Wellness™. Do something to differentiate your employee wellness benefit programs from your competition. Be careful before you offer a raise. While salary increases can be effective employee retention techniques, if your business isn’t in a position to offer a meaningful salary increase, the offer could actually accelerate your employees’ departure. If you’re cash-strapped, you’re far better off improving your employee benefit package due to the power of perceived value. Is a crisis looming? Probably. Is there still time to avert it? Maybe. But only if you begin ... Read More

If you’re in the market for employee health wellness programs – and who isn’t, after the passage of the recent healthcare bill – it’s important to maximize return on your investment while the economic recovery picks up steam. It’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Many employee wellness benefit programs sound appealing, touting physiological screening for likelihood of disability, behavior modification, and diet and exercise as cornerstones, but there are two key questions to ask: How much will I have to bribe my employees to participate? Will this employee wellness program target the highest costs? The answer to both may surprise you. Human nature is working against traditional employee health and wellness program efficacy: Only 4% of smokers participate in cessation programs. Just 5% of obese employees participate in weight management programs. Fewer than 10% of chronic disease sufferers participate in programs designed to alleviate their symptoms. And traditional wellness programs don’t target the highest-cost employee maladies: stress and depression. Depression is six times costlier than obesity. Stress is nearly five times as costly as smoking. Traditional employee health and wellness programs largely shoot for the wrong target. And miss. So it’s time to go non-traditional. Get out of the wellness rut. Do something that’s designed to alleviate stress and prevent depression. Embrace wellness travel. Implement Vacation Wellness. Incorporate it into your work culture. Vacations are good for productivity. Vacations reduce stress. Vacationers are two to three times less likely to suffer from depression. Vacationers stay at their jobs longer. Vacationers suffer up to 53% fewer heart attacks. Vacationers live longer. So think outside of the wellness box. In fact, think outside of the country. Get your employees’ toes in the sand, or get them on a wellness vacation. We’re confident you won’t have to bribe them to participate in your Vacation Wellness employee benefit ... Read More

Human resources employee benefits folks have a difficult problem at the moment: how to optimize employee benefit packages to take advantage of best practices for employee retention, maximize employee wellness benefit programs investment returns, and lower employment costs at the same time. The CFO isn’t asking for much, right? Happily, the problem isn’t as daunting as it might seem at first. But like all other things in life, you can rarely reap value without spending something in return. You’re going to have to spend a little bit of money on your employee benefit package in order to make a lot of money in return. So do it smartly. Invest in employee health and wellness programs. Healthcare costs are expected to double over the next six years, and there’s nobody around who thinks recent healthcare legislation will do anything but accelerate that expense increase. Saving a ton on healthcare requires spending a little money on effective employee wellness benefit programs. The good news is that the good ones have a high return on your investment. Invest in employee retention wellness programs. What is that? Quite simply, if your talent doesn’t like your employee benefits related to health/wellness, they are four times more likely to leave your company. And we’ve found that voluntary turnover already costs the average 100-person professional firm between $3M and $4.5M per year. Follow best practices for employee retention in your employee benefit plan. It’s relatively easy to figure out what’s important to your staff – you just have to ask – but you must be prepared to spend the money when they tell you what they want. Don’t be afraid to spend a little cash here. Convincing just one $80K/year employee to stay with you can save you over $240K in replacement costs. How much would you spend to save $240K? That $20K/year benefit doesn’t seem so costly in that light. Think nontraditionally. In lean times, businesses tighten belts and withdraw benefit offerings. You can easily stand out from competitors without spending much money at all. In fact, you should consider differentiating your firm’s employee benefit package from the competition’s offering as one of your primary employee retention techniques. Offer unique programs such as wellness vacation benefits, flexible work hours, telecommute options, and the like. Do your homework – be sure you’re getting the most mileage out of your employee benefit dollar. For example, most employee health and wellness programs focus on the low end of the cost spectrum, and ignore the costliest employee health problems: stress and depression. If you’re looking for employee wellness program ideas that tackle stress and depression directly, consider Vacation Wellness.™ It’s an easy, inexpensive, and powerful way to influence positive outcomes. Don’t be afraid to spend money to save it. While everyone else is huddled in fear waiting for more bad news, you can seize the opportunity to make your firm’s employee benefit package among the most competitive in your industry – for very little ... Read More

When it comes to contrivances like securities derivatives and health insurance, “price is where supply meets demand” is an old Econ 101 truism that’s unfortunately untrue. Our healthcare system has systematically obfuscated what would otherwise be a relatively straightforward enterprise: caring for the health of our employees. Get sick. See a doctor. Get treatment. Get well. Easy. Except for the part between “Get sick” and “Get well.” We’ve created a complicated web of price variance that makes the details of “See a doctor” and “Get treatment” beyond problematic. Providers must price probabilistically based on the health insurance plan’s historical payout percentage and rate, irrespective of the numbers in bold on the policy. Buried in that process somewhere is the actual cost of service, but pricing becomes more an exercise in probability math than anything else: What’s the chance that the insurance company will pay their portion? When will they pay? How much wrangling will it take? We have an association with an air ambulance company. Ten percent of their full-time staff is comprised of lawyers with one job: get insurance companies to pay up. Layers of artificial complexity have one purpose: to hide true cost. Why has the healthcare profession taken that route? Because they sit opposite an entity whose business it is to minimize claims paid. Confusing the issue allows them to price creatively in order to stay on the black side of the ledger. I’m not disparaging the insurance industry – we run in the same circles, serve the same clients, and desire the same outcomes: healthy employees. But their business is to collect the maximum amount of insurance premium revenue, fund the minimum amount of care, and pay the minimum claim costs in the process. That’s how they pay bills and employees, and how they make profits. Many of them are also interested in keeping their clients healthy – preventatively, so they don’t get sick and file a claim. But we need to understand that insurance companies pay only to the extent required by law (mostly). Why? Because it’s business, not philanthropy. I’m also not disparaging the healthcare industry. There’s a reasonable expectation of remuneration for the lifelong education and dedication required of its workforce. There’s a real cost associated with developing and deploying cutting edge technology. And there’s a real cost associated with getting someone to pay you for the costs you’ve incurred. At the end of the day, the business objective in the healthcare field is to make as much money as possible providing care. Ying and Yang. So, opaque cost structure allows healthcare provider profit amidst the cat-and-mouse. And recalcitrant claims payment enables the insurance industry to keep some for a rainy day as well. And “keep some” they do, if a vociferous watchdog segment is to be believed. John Byrne reports that the top five health insurers earned 56% more profit in 2009 than in the previous year. Industry advocates are quick to point out that 2008 was the depth of a recession, but there are few industries with comparable bounce-back rates. Evil? Unethical? Good? Bad? None of the above. It’s the system we as a society have signed up for, and it’s the one we live with. But it won’t last, and my theory is that at the end of the day, its opacity will be its undoing. There’s another major American industry that’s a few years ahead of the healthcare industry on the life cycle curve. Investment banking built empires on contrived financial instruments with impenetrable definitions, and consequently manipulable value structures that left consumers holding the bag – twice (lost homes, plus bailout burden). It was a rapid slide to oblivion once the curtain was finally lifted. Tulip bulbs and pork bellies were far sounder investments than the inventions of the “responsible professionals.” Am I drawing a parallel between the current healthcare cost conundrum and the ruinous mass deception of the investment banking world? In a word, You’reDamnRightIAm. Any time you veil value in mystery, cloud cost with crap, and invent wildly complicated service structures designed to hide reality from the consumer, you’re heading for trouble. It’s just a matter of time. The fix? Easy. Pretend you’re grocery shopping. You make buying decisions based on bottom line economic disclosure made in good faith. You know what you’re getting, and for how much. Cost clarity allows educated choices. Value rises under its own power. Bad stuff rots on shelves. “But healthcare is more complicated than that.” I know it is. But I also know that it doesn’t need to be nearly as complicated as we’ve allowed it to become. Regardless of regulation, there is ultimately no alternative to transparent fees and prices for healthcare goods and services. We can begin now, and alter the outrageous trajectory of benefits and care fees, or we can wait for the meltdown. If we choose the latter, it’s doubtful that taxpayers will be quite as generous this time ... Read More

Congratulations – you’re going on vacation! Maybe you’re getting ready to take advantage of your Vacation Wellness benefit from work, or you saved long enough to afford a full-price vacation. Maybe you spent the time to plan the details yourself, or had your Vacation Wellness program do the planning work for you. Regardless of how you planned your vacation or how much you paid for it, you want to get the maximum benefit out of your time and money. That means you want to have as much fun as possible, but also experience the full health and relaxation benefits vacationing offers. Believe it or not, a group of doctors at the Medical University of Vienna studied the factors that influence the degree of health benefit that vacationers experience, and arrived at a set of guidelines to help you get the greatest wellness benefit from your time away from the grind. The report is astoundingly boring to read, but we’ll save you the trouble: Make this kind of scene part of your wellness scene! Go someplace warm and sunny! Find a warm beach somewhere with your name on it, and don’t be afraid to grab a few rays. While excessive sun exposure obviously isn’t the point, moderate sunlight has powerful mood, attitude, outlook, and health enhancing effects. And warmer temperatures – particularly for denizens of cold winter climates – enhance the positive results. Schedule time to do nothing. Don’t pack your vacation full of activities, events, side trips, and parties to the exclusion of a good amount of unscheduled free time. Not having to be anywhere at any specific time allows your mind to unwind, and allows you to gain mental distance from the obligations of daily life. Gaining perspective reduces stress, lowers depression risk, enhances coping mechanisms, and boosts the health benefits of your vacation. Exercise. At home, all of the incredibly powerful exercise-induced positive brain and body chemistry effects are counterbalanced by the stress hormones that daily life induces. Those stress hormones are drastically reduced while you’re on vacation (unless you’re “vacationing” at the in-laws,’ but that’s a topic for another time). The whole is greater than the sum of the parts – exercising on vacation multiplies the benefits of both exercise and vacationing. Sleep. If you like to party like a rock star, plan to do that early on during your vacation so you have enough time to return rested and recuperated. Scientists have discovered that improperly-folded protein chains, which degrade the ability of every cell in the body to function properly, are purged from your cells only during sleep. Lack of rest has a very real physical consequence, but you can do your body a great deal of good by allowing time for plenty of shuteye while you’re on vacation. You should plan to sleep until you get tired of sleeping. Meet new friends. Be social. Reconnect with important people in your life. Humans are social animals, and all sorts of positive mental processes happen as we get to know and like new people. So, enjoy your vacation! Take lots of pictures, have tons of fun, and be sure to get the most wellness bang for your relaxation ... Read More

Wellness. Why do eyes glaze over and people suddenly have to be somewhere else when you bring up the topic? Because it isn’t fun! Nobody wants to hear exhortations to get more exercise and eat healthier. Folks know it already. And there’s only one reason they’re not living a healthier lifestyle right now: they’re not ready to commit. As someone who has made difficult, even painful lifestyle adjustments for the sake of health and wellness, I’m here to testify that positive lifestyle change only occurs when people decide they’re ready for a positive lifestyle change. While the wellness message from management might be just the nudge a few people are looking for, it likely won’t be the voice of inspiration for most of your staff. Personal sacrifice accompanies personal commitment, and not much else substitutes effectively when it comes to making positive lifestyle and health changes. But that doesn’t mean your wellness program is doomed to fail. An easy and inexpensive way to ramp up your effectiveness is to make wellness more fun. Here are four quick tips to help your employees get more active—and become healthier, more productive, better rested, and more excited about working for you. They’re really not that expensive, and they’re each designed to bring back the fun factor: Have an active sports league for each season of the year. While sports injuries do occur on occasion, their extent, duration, and cost are nowhere near those resulting from diseases associated with stress. And you’ll be surprised who comes out of the woodwork for softball season! Introduce functional fitness. The idea positions fitness as a sport, and employees compete with themselves for better performance on a daily basis. There’s a ton of high-quality, empirically based fitness information available at www.CrossFit.com. It’s amazing what a little bit of competition will do to motivate higher levels of performance, and the feeling of accomplishment when you’ve set a new personal record is fantastic intrinsic incentive. Make sure employees take all of their time off. Stress is widely recognized as a cause of micro-inflammation, which leads to a host of serious and costly maladies. And just having your folks take all of their vacation time is among the simplest—and cheapest—methods to reduce stress-induced employment costs, absenteeism, health care costs, and turnover. Help staff make the most of their time off with a Vacation Wellness™ membership benefit. Give them access to premium fun-in-the-sun destinations at deeply discounted prices, and you won’t have to twist anyone’s arm to get them started on some serious productivity-enhancing rest and relaxation. Wellness doesn’t need to be all work and no play. If you make a commitment to adding some enjoyment to your wellness program, you might be surprised at who becomes a regular at your wellness ... Read More

More than in any other employment program arena, perceived value plays an important role in the degree of positive impact your employee benefits program has on employee productivity and retention. It’s a phenomenon you can leverage to generate goodwill and improve motivation among your staff, with just a little effort. There’s no shortage of benefit offerings. Pet insurance, supplemental insurance, flexible work hours, telecommute options, and Vacation Wellness™ programs are just a sampling of the wide array of available employee benefit options. While only a few employee benefits can be directly tied to a tangible business benefit (such as retention and healthcare cost reduction), all of your benefits become a strategic investment when you take the time to learn which programs have a high perceived value among your staff. Some answers are obvious – discount monster truck tickets might not resonate at a maternity business – but you’ll never know which benefits are important to your employees unless you ask, and you shouldn’t ask until you’re ready to take action on the answers you get. If you’re ready to reevaluate your strategic investment in employee benefits, you might as well get the most bang for your buck. Here’s an example. A business owner recently rolled out our Vacation Wellness™ program to his employees, with a dramatic response (his staff literally cheered and jumped up and down). This is a terrific example of the benefit’s perceived value among employees far exceeding its cost. If he had told his employees that he was giving them a raise in the amount that the Vacation Wellness™ program cost, his employees would have either rioted or laughed him off the stage – the raise would have seemed so small as to be insulting. But because he had taken the time to discover what was important to his staff, he was able to generate enormous goodwill with a very simple and inexpensive benefit program. Employee benefits don’t have to be difficult, complicated, or expensive. They just have to be valuable to your staff. A little extra effort can go a long way toward making employee benefits a strategic retention and productivity investment. We’ve explored the impact of benefits on turnover in a recent white paper – take a look here. [contact-form 2 “Contact form ... Read More

The Corporate Wellness Advisor reports that only 45% of US workers feel satisfied with their jobs, down from 52% in 2005 and 61% in 1987. With the highest unemployment rates in a half-century, you’d think the numbers would be going in the opposite direction – people should just be happy they have a job, right? But it’s not quite that simple. Feeling thankful for employment is not the same thing as feeling satisfied with your work environment and feeling engaged in your work. It’s worthwhile for employers and business owners to regularly assess their work climate, because employee state of mind, happiness, health, and engagement have an enormous impact on productivity and healthcare costs. Since every business is a people business, it pays to improve employee morale and motivation. Creating a positive work climate that encourages just one $75K/year employee to remain loyal to your company for ten years can save you over $675K in turnover costs. It pays big dividends to have an effective employee retention strategy. How do you improve retention? Businesses are wise to regularly explore two avenues to ensure their work environment isn’t squashing people or profits. First, do regular non-attribution work climate surveys to uncover latent personality or work environment difficulties that might be causing stress or lowering productivity. Owners often discover problems they’d otherwise never hear about by giving employees the chance to answer an anonymous survey. People are reluctant to talk to the boss about workplace difficulties, so it’s likely you won’t hear about them until they’re already a problem – unless you ask for anonymous feedback. Second, be sure your benefits package is up to date and competitive. Everyone offers a solid insurance and EAP plan; you need to go a step beyond in today’s environment to keep your employment costs down while keeping employee motivation high. Consider a vacation wellness plan to help keep your employees healthy, happy, loyal, and low-stress. Your staff and your bottom line will both thank you for the effort! We’ve recently done some in-depth analysis of the factors that influence employee turnover, and its cost to businesses. Learn what you might be spending to replace departing employees, and discover how you might influence them to stay on your team – we’ve summarized our research in a short but informative white paper. We hope you find the information useful and ... Read More

If you’ve spent any time trying to decipher the new healthcare legislation provisions, you’ve probably noticed that it’s difficult to distill meaningful information from the sea of verbiage. The Huffington Post has done a good job of boiling it down (see their article), but the information takes a few too many clicks to uncover (patience is a virtue, just not one of ours), so we’ve boiled it down even further here. And added our own two cents, of course. Everybody’s a critic. Without further ado: No more “sick slashing.” Your insurance company can’t drop your coverage over a technicality if you become seriously ill. Children with existing health conditions are now universally eligible for coverage. Adults in the same boat will have to wait until 2014 for the coverage inclusion measure to include them. Adults with pre-existing conditions will be included in a temporary high risk pool, which will be phased out via exchanges in 2014 (when the exclusion ban takes full effect). The “donut hole” in Medicare drug coverage for seniors will be 50% filled by next year. Children are eligible for parental plan coverage through age 26. Insurance caps will be limited through 2014, when they will be banned altogether. New plans must accommodate preventative care. All plans will have to accommodate preventive measures by 2018. Insurance companies have to reveal overhead expenditures (the public will see the man behind the curtain – the entire law is contentious, but we predict the greatest compliance resistance will surround this measure). Randomly, indoor tanning services will now be taxed. (We’re sure it sounded like a good idea at the time…) LOOPHOLE ALERT: the law allows for new fraud and waste screening procedures. Insurance companies are already notorious for their unnavigable applications – we predict this measure will cause consternation as the details of its implementation flesh out. Rural areas will enjoy Medicare payment protections. Blue Cross organizations must maintain a medical loss ratio of 85% or higher in order to receive tax benefits. Restaurants will have to publish nutritional information. The law closes a “coverage gap” for early retires (55-64), who often experience high coverage costs. The government plans to make a website available with coverage options summaries for each state. The intent is to facilitate consumer education. Therapy researchers can tap into a temporary $1B grant designed to facilitate disease treatment breakthroughs. New plans must implement an approved appeals process for coverage and claims disputes. Businesses with fewer than 50 employees will get tax credits covering up to 50% of employee premiums. We see this as a significant impetus for small businesses to stay small, given that current healthcare measures cost an average of $13,000 per year already. There you have it. Opinions outnumber experts, but there’s one thing we all agree on: it’s going to cost time and treasure like never before to implement the measures as written. We put together a white paper with some ideas for how to reduce your healthcare expenses moving forward. We hope it’s helpful. Just like you, we’re watching carefully as the law’s implementation unfolds. It’s going to be ... Read More