There are outstanding workplaces with prodigious employee benefit packages all over the world, judging from the Great Places to Work Institute’s recent eighth annual conference in Los Angeles, where about 20 employers of choice shared their respective grand visions.

Ouida Peterson is to benefits what Paula Deen is to cooking – except maybe without all the sugar and butter. Don’t let the charming Southern drawl fool you.

Although many tea-leaf readers predicted that health care reform would spur employers to drop health benefits, a new poll of nearly 3,700 executives by Crain Communications shows such forecasts may have been based more on fear than fact.

Here’s a story guaranteed to warm your heart and perhaps think twice about how your company has treated laid-off employees.

I hear a lot of joking (and I confess, I’ve made a few cracks myself) about what’s been called a, shall we say, relaxed, work ethic among Gen Y/Millenials.

With all the chatter around health care reform, you may have missed (like I did) last week’s White House forum on workplace flexibility.

We have another podcast post today, this time with Heather Gatley, executive vice president of HR Services and general counsel for AlphaStaff.

So, we’ve had some time to start to digest the biggest components of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, when they go into effect and the implications for your health plans.

So, I promised that we’d get back to analyzing health care reform, and I am a woman of my word. We’re going to do things a little different today, though, and make today’s post a listen instead of a read.

Okay, I thought we all needed a brief respite from health care reform. So, we’re going waaaay in the opposite direction today with results from a new study by work-life provider SitterCity, which claims to have noted a “SitterCity effect” among employers using its child/elder/pet care resource services.

Forgive me, pros. I’m a little bleary-eyed today, since I stayed up until after midnight to get the official vote tally (219-210, by the way) and real-time analysis of Sunday’s House vote on health care reform.

As if runaway health care costs aren’t enough – now, statistics show U.S. companies annually lose an estimated $2 billion because of employees’ inadequate language skills and poor cultural competence.

So, with an unemployment rate still hovering close to 10% and a growing number of employees feeling detached from their jobs, I’d suspect Digital Insurance is getting a lot of interested applicants these days.

Here’s another tidbit about me: my reality TV-watching habits generally trend toward whatever life change I’m undertaking at the moment.

If you made it through the headline without bile rising in your throat, you’ve already done better than me.

Due to two monstrous snowstorms in the D.C. area, it has now been a full week since I’ve left my home. Did you hear that, pros? A WEEK.

Perhaps you’ve heard, but here in the D.C. area, it’s been a bit snowy lately. By a bit, I mean we've already gotten about 2 ½ feet of the white stuff, with some 10 to 20 inches more expected as I typed this.

Okay, so Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, which means it’s time to talk about such things like heart disease/hypertension, the health benefits of chocolate and of course, workplace romances.

Americans work longer hours than people in most other developed countries, including renowned workaholics in Japan. As a result, work-family conflict is much higher in the United States than in other nations.

What a difference one special election makes. In the wake of Scott Brown’s upset victory in Tuesday's special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy, all the stories about health care reform this morning involve needles — and not the hypodermic kind.