Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

News today from the Congressional Management Foundation and Society for Human Resource Management reveals that the two organizations next week will launch a new joint research project to better understand the working environment on Capitol Hill — specifically to examine how randomly selected members of Congress juggle their work and home lives and assess congressional staffers’ satisfaction with their workplace.

Recently, I came across a news item from U.S. News & World Report that, based on research from the Society for Human Resource Management, detailed 21 workplace benefits that are rapidly disappearing from view—for a variety of reasons.

Although generally a highly rated and highly valued benefit, one of the most irksome realities of flexible spending accounts is that account holders must drain the funds at the end of every plan year or lose them altogether. However, a bipartisan Senate proposal aims to end the FSA “use it or lose it” rule.

President Ronald Reagan was famously known as the “Great Communicator.” In a commentary for the New York Daily News to mark what would have been Reagan’s 100th birthday, Fred Thompson said Reagan’s reputation as The Great Communicator “boils down to three basic traits: he was simple; he was clear; he was sincere.” …

While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle mostly are teeing off on the "Gang of Six" debt reduction plan’s entitlement cuts and tax hikes, Brian H. Graff, executive director and CEO of The American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries, takes issue with the proposal’s cuts to tax deductions for retirement savers.

All this time, I thought it was just retirement plan participants who didn’t understand the fees they were paying. Turns out, according to a recent Spectrem Group study, plan sponsors don’t understand plan fees all that well either.

In a recent EBN podcast with Prescription Solutions’ Patrick Stroh, he outlined a new tool that not only allows benefits professionals to use predicting software to see how much a pharmacy benefit plan would cost by adding in, taking away or tweaking certain elements — network size, copays, etc. — but allows employees to weigh in with their preferences as well. Kind of like giving a 6-year-old a credit card, no?

Given the current status of the bipartisan talks on raising the debt ceiling, I’m not sure how willing to flex and bend congressional leaders are at the moment. Still, I give members of the Society for Human Resource Management credit for trying to stretch lawmakers’ thinking on modernizing the 73-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act to allow employers and employees greater flexibility.

Okay, maybe I’m just out of touch with today’s workforce. First, employees say they will take a promotion without a pay raise. And now, a new survey shows that job seekers are looking for a caring company over a high base salary. The poll, conducted by Monster.com and Unum, finds that the top-rated item on would-be employees’ wish lists was a company “that truly cares about the well-being of its employees.” …

I’m looking for 14 words (posted in the comments) or 140 characters (posted to me on Twitter at @ebnews_editor) to finish the sentence, “Being a benefits professional means …”