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

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

It’s funny how fast something new can become mainstream.  Such as the employee turnover crisis developing in major industry sectors across the US economy, for example.  Nine months ago, mentioning anything about a looming employee retention problem was certain to generate quizzical looks at best, outright derision at worst.  After all, employees were just happy to be getting a paycheck after all of the gloom, doom, layoffs, pay cuts, benefits reductions, and creative salary restructuring.  Right? Not really.  The workforce isn’t infinitely forbearing, and employee retention is now mainstream news.  Human resources professionals are discovering that diverting time, attention, resources, and concern away from best practices for employee retention does, in fact, have a decidedly negative impact on business performance – despite conventional wisdom that employees will put up with anything for a paycheck during tough economic times. We’ve previously reported that voluntary employee turnover is among the most expensive and insidious business costs, and companies that continually optimize employee retention techniques enjoy a significant competitive advantage over the remainder of the marketplace in any economy (white paper here). Relatively few companies have heeded the warnings.  For example, Powers and Powers report that long term care providers are suffering substantial employee turnover difficulties at the critical point of patient care.  Edutopia reports that teacher retention is approaching crisis.  11% of new hires quit during their first year; 30% resign during their first three years, and attrition reaches 45% by the fifth year.  Law.com expresses concern over a looming hiring crisis.  And Talent Management, the Wall Street Journal, HR Magazine, and many other mainstream publications are echoing concerns that employees are increasingly anxious to find a better employment situation, with up to half of the workforce actively or passively seeking a new job. The emerging picture of why employees are leaving, or getting ready to leave, isn’t difficult to digest.  The proximate causes of the rising employee turnover rate relate to reduced salary and benefits, reduced work hours for wage employees, advancement freezes, and loss of opportunity. Increasingly, however, we’re coming to understand the real reason for skyrocketing employee turnover rates as a loss of trust.  Deloitte reports that 48% of departing employees are leaving because they have lost faith in their employer.  In “The Speed of Trust,” Stephen M. R. Covey asserts that 29% of employees feel their management cares about their professional development, and only 42% believe executives care about them at all. Not every employee who distrusts you will depart.  But lost trust has an additional, more insidious cost:  disengagement.  Gallup reports that 96% of engaged employees trust their management and executive team.  Of actively disengaged employees, nearly half distrust their leadership. Is this stuff real?  In a word, yes.  Right Management reports that 54% of companies claim to have lost top performers over the past few months, and only 28% of surveyed companies said they successfully retained their key personnel.  With turnover expenses approaching (and often exceeding) three times the position’s annual salary and benefits costs (see the white paper here), employee turnover is clearly a destructive bottom line burden for businesses to bear. We’ve spoken to literally hundreds of human resources executives about this very problem (see the blog post here).  Only a very small percentage admit difficulties in their companies.  The rest assert undying loyalty and a pervasive sense of family unity among their employees.  Some of them, undoubtedly, are correct.  But all of the statistical evidence seems to indicate that the vast majority of them are poorly informed about the true status of employee trust in their organizations. All is not lost, however. There are five key actions to undertake. Stop talking.  Employees who distrust you assume that when your lips are moving, you’re lying.  Ditch the party line. Start listening.  Hold meetings where the only agenda is to understand employee perspectives.  You’ll be surprised what you learn. If your organization claims to care about employees, show them.  Institute quality of life programs.  Allow flexible work hours and telecommuting.  Reinstate, or find alternatives for, lost perks that improve employee quality of life. Relax scarcity-minded restrictions.  Trust employees to act in the collective best interest, and they usually will. Stop withholding information.  Become transparent.  Air the dirty laundry.  A few might leave when they discover just how ugly things are behind the glossy corporate veneer.  But the vast majority will respect your candor.  And begin to trust you again. Restoring trust is not difficult to do, but it must be done deliberately, and it takes courage.  Smart executives are beginning ... Read More

We talk to hundreds of human resources managers and C-level executives across a very wide swath of industry sectors.  A few interesting and widespread executive delusions have become apparent recently, generally surrounding the topics of best practices for employee retention, current healthcare cost and wellness trends, and today’s employee engagement climate in the “post-meltdown” economy. Some of you will recognize these statements, because you say them.  You might even believe them.  My hope is that if you continue to believe them after reading further, at least you’ll know the magnitude of suspended disbelief you’re indulging.  It’s Hollywood-esque. We’ll start with a good one. Delusion Number One:  “Yeah, healthcare costs are a problem.  But we don’t have an employee wellness program and aren’t considering one.  Money is just too tight right now.  We’re really trying to cut back on our expenses.” Huh?  We’re so busy cutting expenses that we can’t afford to…cut expenses?  The average company spends over $13,000 per employee, per year on healthcare.  That number has risen by 12% per year for each of the last five years.  It’s kind of a big deal for most companies. A benefits manager happily reported that she had expended herculean effort to successfully hold her company’s total healthcare expenditure increase to just under 11% for the year.  Another reported an increase rate in the low 20’s – their plan was more than one fifth more expensive this year than last.  A third benefits coordinator lamented the additional administrative overburden required to unbundle their company’s health plan in order to find piecemeal savings in individual program elements – again to hold their rate increases near 12%. Newsflash:  the supply side of healthcare holds all the cards.  There’s a reason many medical companies are (very quietly) posting record profits.  They’re riding a wave of regulation and demographic influences that might, as some suggest, propel the industry to destruction – but its death will be by gluttony.  Yours will be the opposite fate.  Employee heart surgery and depression costs aren’t going to get cheaper any time soon. Obviously, not everyone is taking the ostrich approach to the healthcare dilemma.   I spoke recently with a benefits coordinator who stood on her CFO’s desk to implement a holistic and comprehensive wellness initiative.  The factual arsenal that won the day?  Just the small item that her personal cost to the company dropped from over $21,000 two years ago to under $700 last year.  How did she reduce her personal healthcare burden to her employer?  Diet, exercise, and relaxation.  Compelling.  Simple.  Profitable. But it’s more than a little surprising – and altogether too common – that it took a William Wallace-like effort to convince the chief bean counter that saving money on healthcare is a good thing.  One of those amazing human paradoxes, I suppose. We’ll move on. Delusion Number Two:  “Our company is a family.  We’ve been through downsizing and have had to cut our benefits and pay, but our remaining 500 employees are loyal and really sticking together and working extra hard to see the company through.  They know we’ll reward them when things turn around.” Not so much. The reality is much different away from the corner office.  Anonymous surveys done by Salary.com reveal that two thirds of employees are job hunting right now. If you’ve had to downsize, whatever sentiment of loyalty that might have existed toward your company before the layoffs was likely quashed by images of equally-tenured, equally-talented cohorts cleaning out their desks or lockers.  In their heads, employees might say “it’s just business, no hard feelings.”  In their hearts, however, there are definitely hard feelings – anger, survivor guilt, and a little bit of betrayal.  It’s human nature to feel those things.  It’s delusional to pretend they don’t exist in your company. Want evidence?  In a recent MSNBC.com poll following the now-famous flight attendant’s famously flamboyant resignation, ten percent of more than 91,000 respondents called him an “idiot.”  Five times as many employees called him a “hero.”  Over 45,000 people admired his “take this job and shove it” departure. That’s a statistically significant figure. If you believe that everyone in your battered, beaten-down, underpaid and overworked workforce is “happy to be here and glad to help the team win,” you’ve attended a few too many shareholder meetings.  You need to hire someone to hang out by the water cooler and report on the real situation.  Taking care of your folks suddenly won’t feel much like a luxury any more. Delusion Number Three: “Our employees have a real sense of duty right now.  They know we need them to work harder than ever and do more with less until we get through this rough patch.” Ask any soldier how the “more with less” program works.  But be sure you have a half hour to hear the angry reply. It’s no different for your workforce.  Making up for a lack of physical resources by overtaxing your human resources is a viable short-term option.  The problem is, if you’re like 98% of businesses out there, the “short-term crunch” is several years old by now.  Your folks are burned out, stressed out, and worn out.  There’s no doubt they put on a brave face for you, but it’s more than time to return to a sustainable employment arrangement. Or else what?  Simple.  They’ll leave.  Talent Management, the Wall Street Journal, HR Magazine, and several other sources have recently featured articles on the looming retention crisis.  To sum up, the “jobless recovery” isn’t actually jobless, and neighboring pastures look greener by the day. What are smart businesses doing about all this? Three things: Smart human resources departments implement employee health and wellness programs. Do it intelligently – be sure to target the two most costly ailments, stress and depression.  Learn more here. Smart CFOs spend a little bit to save a ton.  Take care of your people.  Many benefit programs are exceptionally affordable (many are free, like Vacation Wellness‘ voluntary option), and the research demonstrates that you can get a lot of mileage out of a little care and concern.  Learn more about turnover prevention and cost reduction here. Smart executives guard their employees’ life balance.  Just because your CFO is worried about the books doesn’t mean your employees’ families don’t need them to be present, rested, stable, and relaxed.  And the balance sheet actually does need your employees to be sharp, insightful, and on the ball.  Stop cracking the whip, help them enjoy their time off, and you’ll be amazed at how much better they perform on the job.  Recovering from the economic meltdown will be a marathon, not a sprint.  Better slow down a bit – now would be a rough time to learn about the turnover crisis firsthand. Any war stories of delusional execs?  Any victories in the War on Healthcare Costs?  Any wellness lessons learned?  Better yet, tell us about your summer Vacation Wellness experience!  Please comment below – we’d love to hear from ... 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

Rising healthcare costs, a looming retention crisis, and the slow pace of economic recovery all have CFOs burning midnight oil to bring company ledgers back in balance. If you’ll pardon a little shameless self-promotion, we have news your CFO can use: Vacation Wellness™ saves money. How much? Prepare to be pleasantly surprised. A few examples: A business services company with 36 employees and an average annual salary of $69,000 can save $141,130 every year with Vacation Wellness™. A 150-employee IT firm that pays an average employee salary of $58,000 per year saves an estimated $408,000 every year. A utilities company with 1,250 employees and a $43,000 average employee salary saves approximately $2.68M every year with Vacation Wellness.™ How much can your company save? We’ve put together a calculator to help you figure out a conservative estimate. We love full disclosure, so here’s all the source information for our Vacation Wellness™ savings estimator: Depression costs an inflation-adjusted $8,415 in direct expenses, and causes 9.9 lost days of work. That doesn’t count lost productivity while depressed employees are at work. There was no good data for presenteeism costs, so we left that expense out of our computations – despite estimates that presenteeism is at least as expensive for employers as the direct depression costs. 10% of over 400,000 workers studied developed depression. (Source: Managed Care Magazine and Employee Benefit News). Vacationers are up to three times less likely to develop depression (Source: WebMD). Heart disease strikes 16.1% of American workers between the age of 25-64. It costs an inflation-adjusted $8,523 in direct expenses, and causes an average of 7.5 days of sick leave per episode (Source: The Centers for Disease Control and Managed Care Magazine). Regular female vacationers are 53% less likely to develop heart disease, and males have 32% lower heart disease risk (Source: The Framingham Heart Health Study). Even though the numbers are extremely well documented (the sample size for the smallest study was 46,000 people), we divided our estimated healthcare cost savings in half. We prefer to err on the conservative side. See more comprehensive research results here. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes voluntary employee turnover data by industry. We used an average of the last ten years’ data, which is summarized here. The cost to replace an employee is detailed here. We used a conservative replacement cost salary multiplier of 2.75 in our calculations. Salary.com reports that an effective employee benefits program is the top reason 20% of all employees stay with their employer. We used an ultra conservative 5% voluntary turnover reduction figure in our turnover cost reduction estimate. See the complete turnover report. Impressed? Pardon us for gushing, but we are too. It turns out that employee vacations are a powerful business cost savings tool. Make your CFO’s day – have her ask for a custom price quote and savings ... Read More

In a recent cover story, Talent Management warned of what we’ve been predicting for a while: a looming employee turnover rate crisis. The “Great Recession,” as some have called the recent economic downturn, has kept employee turnover rates – and their prohibitive business costs – artificially low. But that time is ending. Employee turnover rates are expected to rebound this year, and far surpass their ten-year averages (see below). Ten-Year Avg Employee Turnover Rate Construction 26.1% Manufacturing 15.2% Retail 34.7% Wholesale Trade 17% Transportation, Warehousing, Utilities 18.8% Information Technology 20.5% Financial Services 18.9% Insurance 16.9% Real Estate, Rental, Leasing 24.5% Professional & Business Services 31.6% Education 13.2% Health Care 21.4% Leisure & Hospitality 51.8% Arts, Entertainment, Recreation 31.9% Accommodation & Food Svcs 55.3% Other Services 26.5% National Avg 25.8% Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010. Those figures are for voluntary employee turnover rates, not total turnover. That means they’re influenced to a large extent by employment conditions. And the cost of employee turnover is staggering – the average professional firm spends over $4M per year on employee turnover costs alone. We’ve broken down the “Terrible Ten” employee turnover rate drivers to help you diagnose your business’ employee retention plan. Poor leadership. Can you do much about this one? Absolutely. It’s far more prevalent than most imagine, and it has an astounding impact on employee turnover rates and costs. Salary. 20% of workers cite this as their top employee retention consideration. Employee benefits packages. Another 20% claim this as their most important employee retention consideration. Far more than salary, an effective employee benefits plan can generate an exceptionally high ROI as an employee retention strategy. Lack of education opportunities. Employees’ top request was for professional education and enhancement programs. Another name for stagnant employees: job seekers! Poor wellness offerings. If your staff doesn’t like your employee health and wellness programs, they are four times more likely to leave your company. Toxic workplace environment. This is due in part to poor leadership, but interpersonal stress at the workplace contributes to absenteeism and low employee motivation, and ultimately, high employee turnover rates. Lack of progression opportunity. If your employees see no hope for promotion, they will absolutely look elsewhere for employment. So if the idiot son-in-law is a permanent fixture in the corner office, beware! Personal reasons. There’s not much you can do about this one. Just like the toymaker elf who wanted to be a dentist, if an employee’s life ambition takes them in a different direction, your best bet is to let them go. Lack of FUN. The best jobs I’ve ever had have been fun. Not surprisingly, they’ve also been the jobs at which I’ve worked the hardest and produced the most. The same holds true for your employees. Do everything possible to add fun back into life at work. Lack of life balance. Give your employees time away. Make sure they take it. And give them a vehicle to take high-end destination vacations at low cost. The mental and physical health benefits of wellness travel are staggering, and the impact on retention is powerful. It isn’t rocket science. But it takes attention, money, and time to implement best practices for employee retention. With an employee turnover costs crisis looming, now is the time to ... Read More

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