Benefit communication

Defined contribution plan participants have proved woefully uninformed about their funds, and clearer jargon and presentations could help.

Pursuit of higher efficiency pushes shift in human resources to shared services and outsourcing, according to Towers Watson.

While most benefits professionals responding to a recent poll have seen improvements in their benefits communication efforts in the past three years, a sizeable portion are either unsatisfied with or ambivalent about their current strategy.

Research suggests that a slow but steady decline in employee morale from 2008 levels presents an opportunity to improve employee engagement during the upcoming benefits enrollment season.

New York City stands accused of unlawfully excluding bonus payments involving overtime and night differentials from pension benefit calculations for police officers who served in the military since the September 11 attacks.

Even under the best employment conditions, hiring the wrong employee can drag down a company's bottom line and dampen workforce productivity and morale. However, the national skills gap and ongoing economic concerns make finding the right candidate crucial the first time around.

"The current generation has stumbled on an incredibly powerful and important model for changing the world and the workplace: the network."

Pennsylvania is joining a growing movement across U.S. states to overhaul public pensions, but even while the state’s governor says the need for reform is urgent, he advocates action only after great deliberation.

The growing trend among employers to enforce companywide social media policies has sparked the birth of the Password Protection Act of 2012. The new legislation prevents companies from requiring employees to provide access to their personal social networking accounts. While many companies may create a social media policy to protect their corporate reputation, a new Workplace Options and Public Policy Polling survey of American workers shows that companies who scrutinize their employees' personal accounts and social media activity may be doing more harm than good.

Executive leadership must relate to employees and communicate clearly how each person contributes to company success

Employers have experienced dramatic increases in engagement by tapping into employees' innate competitive and social drives. By using social challenges to entice employee interest in wellness initiatives, employers not only build participation, they are more likely to inspire long-term behavior changes.

The lines of demarcation between work and life beyond office walls may have largely disappeared in many organizations, but that’s not to say employees are always accessible when they’re out of the office. With summer officially kicking off on Wednesday, there could be mounting anxiety about reaching vacationing coworkers.

Zone had grown weedy. As the corporate intranet for Quintiles - a biopharmaceutical services company headquartered in North Carolina - QZone had remained virtually unchanged for eight years. It was a fairly traditional intranet containing corporate news, links to various applications and calendars, along with benefits information. But it had stopped growing and evolving with the rest of the company's digital strategy. It was time for a change.

When you know better, you do better, so the saying goes. For Brocade, a Silicon Valley-based high-tech company, the knowing came in the form of a trust survey the organization conducted in 2009 as part of its participation in the Great Place to Work Institute surveys. That trust index survey revealed that women ranked Brocade lower than their male counterparts in 95% of categories. And even though Brocade ranked high overall - achieving a spot on the nation's Great Place to Work list in 2009 - CEO Mike Klayko wanted to dig deeper into what was going on.

After years of declining employee engagement levels around the world, a new analysis released this week by Aon Hewitt showed a positive global shift in employee engagement-or emotional and intellectual involvement in the workplace.

Teach for America - a nonprofit organization that facilitates teaching opportunities in low-income communities for recent college grads - has grown from a small organization since its launch in 1990 with just a few staff members to one that now employs 1,700 people in 43 regions across the United States.

There were 48.4 million Hispanic people in the U.S. as of 2009, making it the largest ethnicity in the nation. On top of it, Hispanics make up 14.8% of the civilian labor force. Projections suggest that "language minority students" (those who speak a language other than English at home and who have varying levels of proficiency in English) will comprise over 40% of elementary and secondary students by 2030.

As Americans live more of their lives online, perhaps it only makes sense that online recognition has taken off in the corporate context.

The perception that a connected, mobile workforce can never get away from work is eroding and employers and employees are becoming more comfortable with the advantages mobile technology offers, according to Doug Ring, chief technology officer with Peoplefluent, an HR software and technology company.

The American Medical Association estimates that every year, $73 billion is lost in unnecessary health care expenditures due to poor "health literacy," the inability of consumers and employees to obtain and understand health care education.