Lisa V. Gillespie

Employees need time to make big benefits decisions. Most benefits managers know this; what might not be known is more communication methods are needed to allow for the best decision making.

Target-date retirement funds will represent nearly half of the total $7.7 trillion in U.S. defined contribution assets by 2020, and low-cost passive funds along with innovative, customized active accounts will be the fastest-growing strategies adopted by investors, squeezing out the currently dominant mutual funds. That's the forecast of Casey, Quirk & Associates, a consulting firm to the global asset management industry.

In an effort to help Americans better prepare for their retirement, ING’s U.S. Retirement division has launched a nationwide initiative that allows employees to instantly enroll in their workplace retirement plan by accessing ING’s online enrollment center through a tablet.

October marks the start of open enrollment season for many American workers — their annual opportunity to reconsider and re-elect the benefits made available by their employers. “The Growing Importance of the Workplace,” the first in a series of research briefs stemming from Prudential's Sixth Annual Study of Employee Benefits, found that 80% of workers believe the workplace is an important source for personal insurance and savings products.

After several years of relatively modest premium increases, annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage increased to $15,073 this year, up 9% from last year. On average, workers pay $4,129 and employers pay $10,944 toward those annual premiums.

Twenty-five percent of employers have little or no understanding of specialty pharmacy and 53% have only a moderate understanding of this challenging benefit according to a new survey released by the Midwest Business Group on Health.

Things have changed. Health care costs have turned benefits from HMOs to consumer driven health care. Pensions have long been a thing of the past and the process has shifted onto the consumer and onto benefit managers.

In 2010, the unemployment rate of post-2001 veterans was 11.5% - including 20.9% among vets age 18-24 - well higher than the national 9.1%. Because of this, President Obama has called for two new tax credits: One would provide an incentive for companies to hire unemployed veterans, and the second would double an existing tax credit for hiring long-term unemployed veterans who have service-related disabilities.

As the economy picks up and companies begin to shift focus from maintaining financial stability to cultivating employee growth, performance management will prove to be a key way to enhance employee engagement and job satisfaction.

The Principal has announced its 10 Best Companies for Employee Financial Security, an annual honor for employers that maintained or enhanced financial supports that overall have dwindled in the past few years as health care costs increased and budgets tightened.

In the digital age of talking via tweet, the term social networks now makes people think of Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. However, according to Dr. Larry Miller, president and CEO of Activate Networks, flesh-and-blood social networks are just as critical, if not more important, than those relationships forged in cyberspace.

Women who take charge, do the math, plan for contingencies and work with their partners and/or financial advisors have a better chance of securing their finances in retirement than those who shrink from the process, according to a new study from the MetLife Mature Market Institute.

You can't throw numbers at Millennials. It just doesn't work, especially in trying to convince them to save for retirement. The focus is on the here and now.

Call it the holy grail, silver bullet or magic pill, but the universal goal of benefits professionals is finding a way to lower costs while maintaining employee engagement. Ron Leopold, vice president medical director for MetLife, says the magic ingredients in the “money pill” may be investments in helping employees find physical and fiscal success.

Employers may find new success in influencing employees to make smarter financial decisions. Last week, a program that reaches employees through an employer-based education program announced the results of Investor Education in Your Workplace, and they were hopeful.

Amidst all the talk of health benefit costs skyrocketing, there may be good news on the horizon. Early responses to a Mercer survey still in the field suggest that the average growth in health benefit cost will slow to 5.4% in 2012, the smallest increase since 1997. Still, cost growth remains well above both general inflation and growth in workers’ earnings.

All those reams of paper in your office — documents to enroll new hires in benefit plans, disenroll ineligible dependents and the like — are costing your company money. A lot of money.

Don’t be fooled by Hedda Bolgar Bekker’s peppered hair and grandmotherly stature — she is most definitely not your average 102-year-old. Quite the contrary, Bekker still works 20 hours a week as a psychologist and travels to speak about aging and the workforce.

All too often, the messages employers intend to convey aren’t the ones employees hear. For companies with a warped communications strategy, a panel of experts offered first-hand advice for becoming an “organizational chiropractor” to straighten out misaligned messaging.

Threat to tax reform around 401(k) retirement plans prompted the American Benefits Council to appeal to Congress on Thursday to “do no harm.”