Open enrollment is a time to review and make changes. A time to make sure you and your employees are ready for anything. As an employer, you have selected the best providers and now your employees have an opportunity to select from among medical, dental, vision, and other protection products to make sure they and their families are ready for anything.
Everything happens at once! Doesn’t it feel like that during 4th Quarter? Not only are companies busy wrapping up the year, trying to meet goals and prepare for next year, but employees will soon be wrapping up in blankets at football games, wrapping twine around the turkey to roast or deep fry it, and wrapping presents to put under the tree.
New federal rules that control when workers are paid overtime wages are changing what it means for employees to be “on the clock.” For Texas businesses, the changes signal a whole new set of regulatory compliance challenges come December 1, 2016.
Karlyn Borysenko has seen a lot of hard places to work. A consultant studying for her PhD in organizational psychology, she gets asked to go in, diagnose, and tell business leaders the truths about their work cultures they don’t want to hear. Even at companies where positivity is policy, she often finds leaders’ efforts lacking.
A happy worker is a productive worker, common sense says, but despite some studies that claim to reveal this correlation, over 70 years of research has not yet proved the axiom true.
Little wonder: It’s a tough thing to measure. These are subjective concepts, after all. What it means for an employee to be “happy” and “productive” changes from study to study and organization to organization. No single definition could ever fit all businesses.
We sat down with China Gorman, HR consultant and former SHRM chief, to discuss why entrepreneurs, when picking perks for employees, often choose the “bread and circuses” model popularized by Silicon Valley technology firms and the mainstream media.
Only a fool would walk away from free money, especially if that money adds up to tens of thousands of dollars over a career.
One part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that has business owners shifting toward offering more voluntary benefits is the Cadillac Tax. Due to go into effect in 2018, this 40 percent levy on “high cost” health care plans was created to offset the costs of the ACA.
Thanks to changes in workplace law and economic pressures raising health care costs, employers are now leveraging the workplace to improve employee health more than ever before.
