Health Risk Assessments are popular wellness program starting points. They’re commonly thought to be an indication of the aggregate risk baseline of an employee population. Unfortunately, HRAs are usually an indication of the aggregate risk baseline for the wrong end of the health risk cost spectrum. Because they’re nearly universally symptom-based, and the solutions they point to are equally symptom-based, the risk reduction techniques employed rarely achieve the ROI available through attention paid to more causal factors. This is a natural outcome of the source of the wellness genre – which arose from the disease management model that underpins our healthcare system – that we are now understanding to be insufficient and inefficient. In short, we’re chasing horses after they’ve left the barn instead of “shutting the barn door” by creating more positive conditions for lasting health. What are those conditions? Nearly all have psycho-emotional roots. Stress and depression create adverse immediate hormonal and biological responses, and influence adverse health behavior as well, setting up a negative feedback loop. Those patterns eventually manifest in adverse HRA indicators, but they should only be treated symptomatically when acute. How does a holistic approach look from a business return standpoint? We’ve thoroughly researched the literature from both a healthcare cost reduction and work environment perspective, and discovered that even conservative holistic improvement estimates are startlingly significant. It makes sense though – the further upstream you address problem areas, the more effective your intervention can be. We’ve assembled a conservative business savings calculator for our solution of choice based on our research. As can be expected with any mindset shift of significance, employee wellness benefit program managers, human resources directors, employee health and wellness consultants, and other stakeholders in the employee wellness and healthcare cost reduction sphere, are migrating slowly toward more cost-effective, integrative, “upstream” health solutions. Our contribution to the genre is Vacation Wellness™. It’s designed to target stress and depression directly by leveraging the power of destination vacations. It works, it’s inexpensive, and it’s easy to implement. By the way, employees love it. Vacation Wellness has an 89% organic (non-incentivized) participation rate. Click here to see why. While there’s not yet consensus surrounding health risk assessment utility (I think you’ve got a good feel for our opinion), one thing is certain: the information you receive about the state of your employee wellness affairs from any HRA is a collection of lagging indicators. Be sure that the employee wellness benefit package you implement tackles stress and depression directly. Otherwise, you’re in serious danger of paying for pounds of cure when an ounce of prevention is all that’s ... 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

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. –Emerson Congratulations! You’ve just rolled out your Vacation Wellness™ Employee Benefit Program to rave employee reviews (if you’ve just emerged from your cave and haven’t yet added this to your employee wellness benefit programs, start here), and are all set to reap the big business benefits of workforce healthcare cost reduction and decreased employee turnover rates. You’re eyeing the Savings Estimator results happily, ready to see the balance return to your company balance sheet. Don’t screw it up. You can still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. How? Simple. By continuing your workaholic ways. Whether you’re doing a good job of it or not, you’re setting the template for your employees’ behavior by your own. If you’re hunched over your computer for ten hours a day, don’t be surprised to see your staff doing the same. If you extol the virtues of wellness travel, and encourage your staff to take advantage of the many wellness vacation deals available as part of their Vacation Wellness™ program, but never take a vacation yourself, it doesn’t take much imagination to guess what will happen. Absolutely nothing. Your staff will do what you do. They may not like your sports team, or take up your favorite hobby, or begin quoting your pearls of wisdom with loving admiration, but they will certainly model their workplace behavior after yours. There’s a discussion on the Employee Wellness Network on this very subject, and Doug Hensch of DRH Group cites an example of this phenomenon. Good or bad, executive behavior becomes employee behavior with lightning speed. So if you’re not digging your toes in the beach sand yourself, you can’t expect your business to reap any of the benefits of your employee wellness vacation program, and your broader employee wellness benefit program results will suffer as well if you’re not putting your time where your mouth is. Perhaps it’s most helpful to think in more personal terms: Regular vacationers are up to half as likely to suffer a heart attack. Assuming you survived, how much would a heart attack set your career and family life back? Could you afford the financial expense? Taking regular vacations makes you three times less likely to suffer depression. What would suffering a six-month bout with depression do to your family? Job performance? Bank account? Vacation wellness reduces stress, which has been linked to all six leading causes of death. How would your stress-induced untimely demise impact your family? Friends? Coworkers? Taking vacations reduces likelihood of developing burnout, a stress-induced, performance-sapping condition that costs employers billions every year. Could your advancement hopes or business goals survive a bout of burnout? Wellness travel only serves to reduce employee healthcare costs, decrease employee turnover rates, and improve employee engagement and motivation if your employees actually take vacations. They won’t if you don’t. If you haven’t already, you should provide Vacation Wellness for your folks. And then you should go on vacation! See you on the ... Read More

Which is which, and what do they mean? Here’s our two cents. And a story. Employee Wellness: An employment cost mitigation effort designed to reduce employee healthcare expenses, improve employee motivation, increase workplace safety, and further a host of health-related goals. Many different employee health and wellness programs fall under the “wellness” umbrella, but all are aimed at helping employees live healthier lives. Travel: In the context of a vacation, travel is inherently a wellness activity. As Da Vinci said, “Every now and then go away and have a little relaxation. To remain constantly at work will diminish your judgment. Go some distance away, because work will be in perspective and a lack of harmony [will be] more readily seen.” (with thanks to Anne Dimon of TravelToWellness) Wellness Travel: A subset of both wellness and leisure travel, the wellness travel concept involves picking destinations and activities with the specific purpose of furthering physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being. Perhaps the concepts are best illustrated allegorically. Suppose Jane is the human resources employee benefits officer at ACME Roadrunner Traps, Inc. Jane has recently heard ACME’s CFO, Mr. Coyote, lament the ruinous cost of employee turnover (which is fast becoming another business crisis), bemoan rising healthcare costs (which is already a business crisis), and remark how he wished someone could hatch a few worthwhile employee wellness program ideas to help control rising employee turnover and healthcare costs. Having recently read Zoescent’s amazingly informational and brilliantly crafted (ahem) white papers on both healthcare costs and employee turnover rates, Jane has become aware that most employee benefits related to health/wellness shoot for the wrong target, and miss. Jane also used Zoescent’s Savings Estimate Calculator and discovered that Vacation Wellness™ can save ACME a bucket full of cash every year. Vacation Wellness™ reduces health care costs and employee turnover rates by leveraging the inherent wellness properties of destination vacations. Jane learned that taking a vacation is an employee wellness activity, because: Vacationers are three times less likely to develop depression, which is the costliest employee health condition. Taking regular vacations makes you 32% less susceptible (men) and 53% less susceptible (women) to heart attack. Going on vacation reduces stress, which has been linked to each of the six leading causes of death. Regular vacationers are eight times less likely to die prematurely than their non-vacationing counterparts. 82% of executives agree that vacations improve employee motivation and productivity. Naturally, Jane was happy to show the numbers to Mr. Coyote, who, never satisfied, thundered “then why don’t we have Vacation Wellness RIGHT NOW!?!?” (he’s a tough boss). Luckily, Jane was able to enroll all of ACME’s workforce in a matter of moments right from her computer. Almost immediately, ACME’s employee motivation and engagement shot through the roof, absenteeism and turnover plummeted, and roadrunner trap engineers began designing and building a better, er, roadrunner trap. But it didn’t stop there. In any group, there are those who take things the extra distance, who put in the extra effort to make an even bigger difference. So was the case with ACME’s world-traveling, highly motivated, highly productive workforce. Many of them didn’t stop at just enjoying the inherent wellness benefits of travel. They went even further, and became devotees of the growing practice of taking wellness vacations. Instead of just relaxing on the beach, these wellness travelers exercised, practiced yoga and pilates, and played sports on the seashore. Instead of merely soaking in the resort sights, the wellness vacationers enjoyed massages, meditation, hot springs, and healthy gourmet cuisine. And in place of just gazing at picturesque mountain scenes, wellness travelers hiked and scaled the peaks in the summer and skied down the mountains in the winter. They discovered a wealth of enjoyable, relaxing wellness activities at all of their destinations. Best of all, thanks to Vacation Wellness™, even the finest of gourmet wellness vacations fit comfortably within ACME employees’ budget. Was anyone unhappy with these developments? The roadrunner population protested vehemently. As for Jane, she was promoted to the coveted corner office, though she chose the corner opposite Mr. Coyote’s. The moral of the story? Whether your employees choose wellness travel or just enjoy the health benefits of leisure travel, your business wins when you leverage the “wellness power” of ... 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

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

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