Benefit management

American Airlines kicked off a week-long court hearing on its bid to abandon union contracts, telling a judge on Monday that its bankrupt parent, AMR Corp, cannot survive without major concessions from its labor force.

Employers continue to move from traditional defined benefit pension plans providing monthly payments to 401(k) plans and other defined contribution plans providing lump-sum cash distributions. As a result, increasing numbers of retirees, now including baby boomers leaving the workplace, are faced with managing a cash distribution for 20 or 30 years and possibly running out of funds. Uncertain markets have made plan participants wary of their ability to maintain their nest eggs. …

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.

Small businesses aren’t known for offering rich retirement plans; workers in firms with fewer than 100 employees are much less likely to have a retirement plan available to them than workers in large firms, according to the Small Business Administration. The financial services industry is making inroads to service small business retirement needs, however, most recently with the Merrill Edge Small Business 401(k) through Bank of America. This retirement solution offers small business owners, who generally have 401(k) plan assets under $250,000, a simplified, easy-to-manage retirement plan with lower costs than many traditional 401(k) plans, enabling small businesses to provide an important benefit to their employees.

For large, self-insured employers, vendor management involves identifying and negotiating better arrangements with third-party vendors who administer benefits. A report from The Advisory Board Company shows that while vendor management is often overlooked by plan sponsors, the process can yield savings of between 5% and 10%.

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.

Each January, the IRS updates several revenue procedures that prescribe the process for requesting determination letters for qualified retirement plans. For the most part, these have changed very little from one year to the next, except for increases in user fees charged. This year, the IRS made significant changes, which purportedly are intended to improve its efficiency. To understand why the new guidance involves both good news and bad news for plan sponsors necessitates a…

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%).

Today, employee benefit plans - and those responsible for administering and overseeing them - are facing greater scrutiny and more regulations than ever before. With the growth in the number of defined contribution plans, the Department of Labor is paying closer attention to how plan administrators and trustees discharge their legal obligations to prudently monitor plan investments, comply with the plan documents and exercise oversight over third-party vendors.

Government is perhaps the last employer segment that provides benefits that liken to those retiring baby boomers remember: A strong pension plan and paternalistic health care benefits.

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.

Economic pressures have pushed third-party administrators to proactively market to potential employer-clients. With an increasingly complicated regulatory environment, TPAs are demonstrating their worth with enhanced marketing techniques.

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.

HR’s role in merger and acquisition deals is growing, say M&A experts at management consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

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

Should an employer allow an employee to work on a side business? The question is fraught with ethical issues. The word thorny comes to mind, which is why we called on Gregory Fairchild. As an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, Fairchild teaches strategy, entrepreneurship and ethics. He says the outside-work question can often be distilled to a fairly simple equation: "To what degree is there an implicit versus an explicit agreement about working on a side business?"

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.