Employment Resources

Businesses need to inform their workers about health plan changes under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. That’s the word from Paul S. Amos, II, president of Aflac, Inc., a major health insurance provider.

Says Amos, “If you believe in your employees and want to retain them so can grow your company and corporate culture, it makes sense to educate them about how the act will affect their health benefits and premiums.” He noted that the Aflac 2013 WorkForces Report, a nationwide survey of 1,900 employers and 5,300 employees, found that nearly four in five employees (79%) believe that effective communication about health plans would make them less likely to leave their current positions.

Unfortunately, most businesses have not yet educated their workers about PPACA. According to the survey, nearly three quarters of employees (72%) were unaware of consumer-driven health care plans, while 76% were not knowledgeable about health care exchanges.

What’s more, only one in four employers (26%) said they fully understand the health care reform law.

Amos offers businesses this advice:

“The reality is your workers need you and, if you don’t educate them [about changes in health benefits plans], they’re going to begin to think about going elsewhere. Rather than picking themselves up by their bootstraps and saying, ‘I’m going to learn it myself,’ they’ll just go to another employer who will keep them informed.”

As Employee Benefits specialists, we’d be happy to explain the PPACA health care plan reforms to your workers and help them make decisions about their benefits.

With life insurance, you may pay your final expenses and provide financial support to your dependents. This insurance is valuable, and you should consider purchasing group term life insurance for five important reasons.

First, understand that group term life insurance describes an insurance product that’s available to a group. Many employers offer it to their employees to purchase when they start with the company or during open enrollment. The premium costs may be covered by your employer as part of your benefits package or you may pay it through payroll deductions.

This type of life insurance covers you for a set time. It includes a set death benefit that’s awarded to the beneficiary of your choice if you die before the term expires. Group term life insurance remains in effect until the term expires and as long as you remain employed with the company and pay any assigned premiums.

There are five good reasons to purchase group term life insurance, so consider them carefully as you decide if a policy is right for you.

1. Afford Life Insurance

   Because this insurance is offered to a group of people, it typically costs less than an individual policy, making it affordable for many consumers.

1. 
   Provide for Loved Ones

   The death benefit of a term life insurance policy goes to the beneficiary you name on the policy. They can use the money to pay your final expenses, cover their daily living expenses, repay debt or fund college or retirement. You may also name a charity or scholarship fund as the beneficiary.

1. No Medical Exam Required

   Individual life insurance policies often require a medical exam to prove that you are an acceptable risk. Group policies often do not have the same medical exam requirement, which means you are eligible for coverage even if you have a serious illness, disease or other high-risk factor.

1. Boost Your Overall Life Insurance Coverage

   You can own a separate individual life insurance policy and qualify to purchase group term insurance from your employer. Additionally, most group term policies allow you to purchase additional coverage on the policy. With these benefits, you boost your total life insurance coverage and provide additional financial resources to your beneficiary.

1. Cover Family Members

   Provide invaluable life insurance coverage to your spouse and children when you add them to your group term policy. Your dependents will not need to undergo a medical exam, and you’ll simply pay the extra premium through paycheck deferrals.

Protect your loved ones when you purchase life insurance. Group term life insurance is an excellent way to buy this valuable coverage, so ask your employer about it today.

Are you getting the best return on your investment in employee benefits? Unfortunately, it’s not always not easy to answer this question. You might well have too much information on some programs – and too little on others.

To help employers evaluate the cost-effectiveness of health-related benefits program, experts recommend these guidelines:

1. Focus on the overall picture.

   It can be easy to miss the forest for the trees. For example, when measuring the impact of a return-to-work program, it’s easy to determine whether disabled employees are getting back on the job sooner. However, you also need to consider the overall impact of the program on your other health-related benefits.

1. Share information among programs.

   Most employers manage their health benefits in separate silos – Medical insurance in one place, Disability in another, and Workers Compensation in a third. Be sure to distribute every incident of medically related absence throughout the company. The more effectively you integrate your data among all your benefits programs, the better.

1. Benchmark your results against those of your peers.

   The easiest and most straightforward standard is how comparable companies in your industry are doing. Although this might not be a precise comparison, it should give you a fair idea of what your competitors are doing right (and wrong) with their benefits programs – offering guidance you can use to improve yours.

For example, to compare your Short-Term Disability program with these of other companies, consider how the incidence and duration of disability incidents are related to underlying diseases in the workforce and the design of the plan (the elimination period, rate of wage replacement rate, maximum benefit period, and so forth).

We’d be happy to help you evaluate the cost-effectiveness of your benefits program. Just give us a call.

Many employers offer numerous benefits to employees. These benefits improve morale and productivity and allow employees to better plan their finances and futures. A typical benefits package may include health insurance and a retirement plan, however your employer could also offer voluntary benefits such as life insurance, dental and vision coverage and critical illness insurance.

Legal insurance is another voluntary benefit your employer may offer. It works like health insurance. You pay a premium from every paycheck and receive access to legal advice from a network of experienced and vetted attorneys. Understand this coverage as you decide if it’s right for you.

Why You Need Voluntary Legal Insurance

If you’ve ever needed to contact a lawyer, you know how intimidating and expensive it can be. First, you have to find an attorney who specializes in your situation. Then you have to decide if you can afford the fees. The process takes time and can be scary as you face legal issues that threaten your financial security and peace of mind.

Voluntary legal insurance relieves the burden of finding an attorney and paying the fees. You save time since you have access to a network of local and national attorneys who specialize in your specific legal challenges. You also save money since you don’t have to worry about paying for the consultation and services you need. This coverage helps you manage your legal costs and protects your security and peace.

What Does Voluntary Legal Insurance Cover?

Every legal insurance plan is different. In general, voluntary legal insurance covers advice and consultation services about a variety of personal legal matters, including:

• Identity theft issues
• Financial concerns
• Debt issues
• Elder care matters
• Family law concerns
• Domestic relations and other family related matters
• Tenant matters
• Wills and estate planning
• Power of attorney establishment
• Real estate matters
• Traffic defense
• Personal injury claims
• Civil litigation/consumer transactions
• Criminal matters

Depending on your coverage, you may also receive access to DIY legal documents, an online legal library and customer care center access. You could also receive a reduction in fees when you consult a network attorney about matters related to non-covered, non-excluded issues.

How Legal Insurance Works

To enroll in your employer’s voluntary legal insurance plan, contact your Human Resources manager. When you’re approved, you receive a detailed Schedule of Benefits, and payments are deducted from your paycheck. Your attorney will complete the claim form you submit to your Human Resources manager or insurance agent.

If your employer participates in a voluntary legal insurance plan, consider signing up for coverage. You’ll gain practical assistance and guidance from a qualified attorney and receive peace of mind.

Here’s a newsflash: Management is responsible to employees, but not for employees. The whole notion that we’re somehow responsible for employees came out of the control and domination era of the manufacturing age. ” Just do what we tell you to do, don’t think yourself, follow our agenda until you’re 65, and we’ll take care of your health and finances until you pass away actually at 67.”. Here are some examples of when you know you’ve been stuck in the position of being responsible for employees rather than responsible to them:

1. You find yourself doing too much for them. When people can’t get their jobs done, do you step in and save them? Or do you let go of control and allow them to take responsibility for their results?
2. You think that you have to bribe them to perform well. Frustrated parents will try to buy their children’s behavior. It’s a mistake when managers try to do the same thing.
3. You’re overprotective. You won’t share an employee’s true shortcomings with them because to do so would put them at risk. As a result, you’ll start engaging in a codependency with this person, thus enabling continued poor performance.
4. You micromanage.. Do really want to spend your time trying to control a bunch of adults, anyway? Smart managers are clear about their objectives then empower employees to reach them.
5. Your meetings are one-way communications. You spend time lecturing employees as if they were schoolchildren, rather than empowering them to share problems, ideas, and solutions.
6. You fail to draw a line in the sand. Many managers will never draw this line because they’re playing “savior games.” You know you should fire an employee, but you’re also aware that if you do so this person might go into a financial tailspin. As a result, you keep the employee, which harms both them and the company.

When you’re responsible to employees, you put them in a position where they become capable of success. It then becomes their responsibility to succeed. You can identify your expectations, express your limits, and provide feedback and judgment without trying to fix things yourself, and encourage but not enable them.

Finally, realize that you and anyone that you manage will make some mistakes. Don’t freak out when this happens; just ask yourself what can be done so it never happens again. In this situation, explore your responsibility and allow the employee to explore theirs.

Answers Marked on Test ca. 2001

Here’s a fact: Half of all employees test better than the other half! My question is, which half do you have?

Testing job applicants and employees is one of the favorite topics in my CEO and HR workshops. Because most companies don’t do appropriate testing, those that do enjoy a significant advantage. I like to begin the subject with a story. Years ago, as I was quitting my litigation practice, a legal secretary (we’ll call Sue) came into my office and wanted to sue the firm she had been working for. The fact that a law firm could be sued by one of its employees came as no surprise. Lawyers get sued by their employees more than just about anyone else – and we rely on lawyers’ advice so we don’t get sued! A little Catch-22 in the system, you might say.

To keep the story short, it turns out this legal secretary had a steady job at neighboring law firm, working for a partner for 15 years. At the same time, a litigation partner at another firm lost his legal secretary with only last-minute notice. He put the word out on the grapevine that he was looking for a replacement, and that’s where Sue met up with him. After meeting for a pleasant lunch, the attorney figured that she had 15 years of experience doing the very job he was hiring for, she seemed pleasant enough – and so he hired her on the spot. To Sue’s surprise, almost immediately after coming to work, he started expressing his disappointment with her productivity. This went on for three months until he fired her without any offer of severance. Sue was a single mom with two kids to raise on her own and no job; that’s what prompted her to walk into my office.

I asked her if she and the attorney discussed any performance benchmarks or requirements at their one meeting. They had not. Understand this: a legal secretary types about half of the day; and half of them type above average and half below average (this holds true for programmers and retail sales clerks as well). Personally, I’ve never hired a legal secretary who typed less than 100 words per minute. When I asked Sue how fast she typed, she told me approximately 80 words per minute. She found out by testing herself years ago. None of her employers had ever tested her. I then tracked down the previous legal secretary; according to a test she took, she typed approximately 100 words per minute. Therein lies the moral to this story – the woman in my office was a failure on the first day of her employment and nobody knew about that fact!

This begs the question, “how many people walk into your company a failure on the first day and no one knows about it?” It makes no difference who you’re hiring , including rocket scientists, What’s the range of skill sets at your company? Without testing, you’re only guessing.

Let’s take this idea one step further. According to both Dr. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker (perhaps the two greatest management gurus of all time), nine out of ten people want to do a good job every day – and their inability to do so is generally due to a system failure rather than a lack of motivation. Let me give you an example of how this plays out: at about the same time Sue walked into my office, I was consulting with a law firm that was having turnover problems. With the economy growing at the time, the larger firms were simply throwing more money at these employees. Although this was unrelated to my assignment, it dawned on me to ask them a basic question: “Have you tested all of your legal secretaries?” Turns out they had not – so that’s exactly what we did. We tested them not only on their typing, but also on the substantive and procedural knowledge that their job required.

Here’s what we learned: In most law firms, the attorneys get no management training and generally there are two attorneys to each secretary. Let’s assume that two of those attorneys manage intuitively above average and another two happen to manage below average. Now let’s say there’s a legal secretary who types 80 wpm for an above-average manager. The other secretary types 100 wpm for a below-average manager. Who do you think is viewed as the better secretary at the end of the day? When I ask this at workshops, most people respond “the one who types 80 wpm for a good manager.” This secretary gets the better performance evaluation and the raise – which makes absolutely no sense.

You can, and should, test for every essential skillset. For example, a few years ago I helped a real estate investment firm hire a CFO. Because they were Good to Great fans and wanted to have a great company, they decided to have a great CFO. When it came to testing, we decided to address the three essential skillset categories: substantive knowledge of accounting (GAAP), QuickBooks, and finally, Excel (because they used it for their real estate deals). So I contacted SHL (who I’ll talk about in a bit) and we set up tests for qualified job applicants. These tests cost us between $17 and $30 each. Because we wanted a CFO in the top 10% of skillsets, we decided that they would have to test in the top 20% of all three categories. It took us months to find that CFO, and in the meantime we used Account Temps. That’s the type of testing discipline you must go through if you want to have great employees.

For the past ten years, I’ve recommended only one company to do skill testing because I believe that it’s the best. When I first met them they were known as BrainBench. They were then acquired by PreVisor, and finally by the largest testing company in the world, SHL. Our contact is Jason Finney (jason.finney@shl.com). He is awesome and is surrounded by a great team. You can contact Jason to set up tests for your job applicants and existing employees. Not only will this help you to hire better, it will also help explain a lot of what’s going on with performance and what training you need to improve it.

Here’s what SHL users have said about testing: http://www.shl.com/us/results/client-results/. If you think this sounds like an endorsement of SHL, you’re right. So use them!

If you’d like a certificate for a free test from SHL, contact Jason directly and he’ll get it to you. If you’re an HR That Works Member, watch the one-hour webinar I did with Ken Lahti, one of the testing experts at SHL.

I also think it’s important to use skill tests when you hire consultants. How do you really know if they’re any good without testing them? For example, when we built HR That Works on a SharePoint platform, how did I know if our project manager was an expert or not? Yes, we were using a Microsoft Certified Partner, but that didn’t mean that the individual project manager was at the top of his game. Fortunately, he took a SharePoint test and scored very high, thus justifying my faith in his skills. Don’t trust the skillsets of employees, applicants, or third parties blindly – test for them!

As a final note, the skill testing I’m talking about is separate from character assessment. Fact is, you can’t fail your personality, so they don’t call them personality tests. However, it’s true that people can have failing personalities– and these are the people to make sure you don’t hire!

The Westendorf v. West Coast decision by the Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals offers yet another example of management’s failure to understand that sexually hostile behavior is not permitted in the workplace.

In this case, the boss and coworkers said the plaintiff was doing “girly work,” talked about the large breasts of another woman with her, made tampon jokes, joked about orgasms, and eventually started cursing at her. As mentioned in previous articles, whether she eventually ends up winning or losing isn’t the point. Either way, the employer now finds itself as a named defendant in a nationally publicized lawsuit that will cost it tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars to defend what amounts to stupid and boorish conduct.

In this case, the plaintiff never reported the alleged harassment to a human resources officer. Perhaps if she had an alternative channel of complaint other than through the ranks, she would’ve received appropriate attention. Apparently the boss did admonish a manager and coworkers to quit the harassment, but when they continued it, the plaintiff just couldn’t take it anymore.

The court ruled that although the sexually hostile conduct was not severe or pervasive enough to alter the terms of her employment and support a sexual harassment claim, she might have faced retaliation for bringing the claims in the first place. It’s important to note even though this case was decided on April 1, 2013 dealing with conduct that ended in July 2008, it has yet to go to trial! I can only imagine what it could have, and should have, been settled for soon after filing, rather than slogging through the courts for the past five years. This doesn’t benefit either the plaintiff or the defendant – but it certainly helps fill counsel’s billable hour requirements.

While the distractions of social media and always-on devices pile up, it’s becoming increasingly important for people to unplug and refocus. Workplaces can be circuses of nonstop meetings, endless barrages of email and social networking, and people walking around with their faces stuck in devices.

And the solution to technology overload may be mindfulness.

Many organizations are finding that mindfulness works: it decreases stress, increases productivity, and helps people form better personal connections. Companies such as Google, Procter & Gamble, Aetna, General Mills, and Target all have meditation rooms. The Seattle Seahawks have a meditation coach, as do other sports teams and entertainment figures, including 50 Cent and Katy Perry. Even the US military is teaching mindfulness techniques to members of the armed services.

If you don’t have a mindfulness coach or advocate at your company, you can still practice in the comfort of your office, home, or cubicle. It’s easy, and you can see benefits by spending only five minutes a day. Here’s how.

Mindfulness is like a workout for your brain.

Wait. It’s easy?

It is! All it takes is 5 to 10 minutes a day. Find a place in your home (or office) where you can sit comfortably and undisturbed. Leave your phone in another room on silent mode. You don’t need to cross your legs or put your hands in funny shapes. You also don’t need to say, “Ommmm.” All you have to do is sit there and concentrate on your breathing. When your mind wanders, go back to thinking about your breathing. Repeat until 5 or 10 minutes pass. That’s it.

Why can’t I have my phone?

Silly person, your phone is a distraction. It may ring or ding or vibrate, which will take you out of the moment and make you want to answer it, look at it, or silence it. You’re trying to eliminate distractions like that.

Over the years, we’ve become so addicted to taking in information, it’s become our primary mode of operation. It started with television, which people still sit in front of and do nothing except absorb whatever’s being shown on the screen. Now in recent years we’ve done the same with computers and phones. We move from one screen to another and one piece of information to another with no time to think, synthesize, or be creative.

Eventually you may want to create a space in your home with a “no technology” rule, like your bedroom, so you don’t have the temptation of picking up your phone in the middle of the night or looking at it first thing in the morning. That way you can be more aware of what you’re doing without having your attention stolen by the latest email message.

You mentioned some benefits?

Yes, many benefits. Focusing on the benefits is probably the best way to get you to set aside some mindfulness time. Here are a few backed up by data and research:

• Increased ability to focus.
• Physically shrinks the stress centers of your brain.
• Increased ability to know what is happening in your head without acting on it.
• Better self-awareness.
• Increased sense of compassion.

Another benefit that can’t be undervalued is creativity. To be creative, you need space and time. You need to be able to be alone with your thoughts. That’s impossible when you’re surrounded by distractions that prevent you from concentrating on anything for a long period of time. Filmmaker David Lynch famously explored this idea in his book Catching the Big Fish.

In a lot of ways, mindfulness is like a workout for your brain. We already know it’s important to work out our bodies to stay healthy, so it makes sense to dedicate some time to working out our minds. You may find you’re happier, more creative, and better able to concentrate on whatever you’re doing.

Voluntary benefits have been gaining traction with employers and employees as valuable supplemental coverage to a core benefits package. For example, in today’s age of skyrocketing medical costs, programs such as Disability, Accident, and Critical Illness insurance are increasingly popular with workers concerned about paying for health care.

Although these primary plans have been garnering most of the attention, a number of voluntary “work-life plans” are also important in employees’ daily lives, yet are often overlooked. These benefits are easy to implement and are generally available to employees at special group discounted rates through payroll deduction.

Popular work-life plans include:

• Identity Theft protection. This coverage help victims manage the cost and hassle involved with clearing their good name and credit.

• Auto and Homeowners insurance: These basic policies are usually available at group rates.

• Legal Services. Helps employees pay for the services of licensed attorneys for such matters such as will preparation and real estate purchases.

• Pet insurance: Assists workers in picking up the tab for the veterinary care that their beloved animal companions need.

• Discount purchase program: Easier credit qualification requirements and payroll-deduction payments can save money for employees on essential household purchases.

Work-life benefits not only provide helpful coverages at affordable rates, but can also serve as a conversation starter help raise employee participation among other voluntary benefits.

What’s not to like?

Our agency’s professionals would be happy to analyze your benefits program and recommend the work-life options best suited to your employees. That’s what we’re here for!