Benefit communication

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.

Lyndsey Allen used to work across the street from Zappos' main office in Henderson, Nev. She'd sit in her cube, watching Zappos staffers stage impromptu parades around the parking lot in themed garb. She was perfectly content at her current job, but wanted something different. For six months, she prowled the Zappos job site and when a recruiter position opened, she pounced. A year-and-a-half later, she conducts phone interviews at a desk in the middle of the Zappos office, where those spontaneous parades now play an important part in her daily work.

You may not be hearing it directly from your employees, but most are not happy with the customer service health plans provide. A new research report published by Temkin Group, a consulting firm, rates the customer experience of 206 large companies across 18 industries.

Health-related applications are among the top three apps employees are most interested in using on their smartphones or tablets. Weather-related apps came in at No. 1, cited by 53.6% of respondents, followed by music (52.9%) and health-related (51.2%).

One-to-one benefits counseling during open enrollment significantly improves employees’ understanding of their benefits, according to a recent post-enrollment survey.

Increasing employee engagement with benefits enrollment is difficult at best - and even more so when attempting to communicate concepts such as high-deductible health plans and health savings accounts. As more employers make the switch to full replacement HDHPs, it's more important than ever that employees fully engage with open enrollment materials so that they understand how to use the plans.

Statistics show 96% of Americans use Facebook, and 46 million check their social media profiles daily. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, more than one-half (56%) of organizations currently use social networking websites when recruiting potential job candidates, a significant increase from 2008, when 34% did so. However, when it comes to in-house communications, most companies still use face-to-face or email to convey key HR/benefits messages and information.

Creating a safety net for your social-media activities has never been more important.

After months of crunching numbers, your company concludes the only way to control its rising health care costs is to replace its current plan with a high-deductible, consumer-driven health plan. You assume employees are going to hate it, and you're already envisioning the nasty calls you're going to get from irate workers who see an increase in their out-of-pocket expenses. So should you even bother asking employees what they think, since the plan design's already a done deal?

As each new generation of young people enters the workforce, they are almost always different from the generations before because of advents in technology and culture.

Social media tools now are present on most corporate intranets, with 61% of companies reporting at least one social media tool available to some or all employees. Read what the most popular Intranet 2.0 tools are according to a new social intranet study.