Employee Stress Levels and Un-Productivity on the Rise

Keeping employees engaged and productive at work is an uphill battle when they’re stressed out by personal finance. Two recent surveys show that HR professionals and employees alike think employee preoccupation with money issues has grown worse in the past 12 months, with damaging consequences.

Stress

Employee financial stress is harming productivity at work

In January the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) questioned HR professionals about how employee work habits were impacted by personal financial anxiety. Of the negative effects financial stress has on employees, HR professionals cited these as the top problems:

  • The ability to focus on work (47%).
  • Overall stress levels (46%)
  • General productivity (26%)

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Published by Sophie Asmar on May 4, 2012

Have You Seen Our New Demo Videos?

Health and Financial Benefits, New Employment Orientation and Open Enrollment Covered

GuideSpark’s brilliant Content Development team has designed five new demo videos to give you a better idea of how you could be using video to engage your employees on benefits-related topics. All of these topics are covered in the GuideSpark Benefit Video Library.

  • High Deductible Health Plan with Health Savings Account (HSA) – shows employees how HSAs can be a good way to get the right health benefits while saving money.
  • 401(k) – discusses contribution matching, traditional vs Roth, investment options and more.
  • Making Your Money Work – covers basic information on Credit Scores, how they affect financial wellness and how to improve them.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on March 27, 2012

Consistent Benefits Communication Saves Money

Delivering consistent messaging is not just good communication, it saves time and money. This is surely an obvious statement, but how well do you implement it in your organization?

  • Are your informational events well attended?
  • Is everyone who wants to attend able to do so?
  • Do your support call numbers rise after a series of seminars?
  • Are many of the questions about confirming facts or clearing up discrepancies between presenters?
  • Do you feel that live seminars are an efficient use of resources?

With employee benefits videos, you can ensure that the same clear message is delivered to all of your employees–regardless of what location they work out of, what shift they’re on or whether or not they (or their family decision maker) can attend your seminar.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on March 16, 2012

Top 5 List: How Video Can Improve Benefits Communication

Top 5 List: How Video Can Improve Benefits CommunicationEveryone watches online videos. They’re easy, entertaining and informative. But they aren’t just for fun. Video is more than just a fad. It’s an improvement in how we communicate.

 Traditional methods of HR communication—including long and confusing plan documents, time-intensive on-site seminars, and jargon-filled emails that are usually ignored—simply aren’t engaging today’s workforce. Yet, the more we require employees to be benefits consumers, the stronger our need for effective, engaging communications. HR Departments that incorporate video into their benefits communication can enhance overall employee engagement, use HR resources more effectively and achieve ROI on key benefits programs.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on March 7, 2012

Consumer Web Trends in the Enterprise: Social Networking

When we meet with HR professionals, one of the first discussions we have is just how much has happened in the world of communications over the last 5 years.  Sure, most of the innovation has occurred out on the consumer web but we have always maintained that it’s only a matter of time before the more mainstream trends make it into the enterprise. 

Employee Communications

Employee Communications Trends

 

We obviously think that video is an important consumer trend for employers to embrace in their employee communications strategies.  Another consumer trend that you may be tired of hearing about at this point – social networking – is the latest to gain enterprise adoption.  There are two companies in this space that have created a sort of Facebook for the enterprise that are growing at impressive rates:

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Published by Joe Larocque on February 21, 2012

Wellness Programs Call for Better Communications

Wellness Programs Communications

Wellness Programs Call for Better Benefits Communications

Wellness programs are all the rage this year. But what’s the point of a program that employees don’t understand and, therefore, don’t use? Midwest Business Group on Health has done some research evaluating employee engagement in health benefits and wellness programs.

What they found: Employees still do not understand their benefits. Part of the reason why employees are having trouble meeting their wellness goals is a lack of good communication and resources. MBGH found, “Most employees and dependents don’t fully understand what health care benefits are available to them nor do they fully comprehend the summary plan description (SPD) or what requirements they need follow to achieve incentives (i.e. premium differentials) that may be part of the benefit plan design. As a result, communications efforts frequently go unnoticed, are ignored or misunderstood by the employee.”

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Published by Sophie Asmar on February 3, 2012

Learn How Two Fortune 100 Best Places to Work Communicate Benefits

How do Fortune 100 Best Places to Work communicate open enrollment changes and engage employees on benefit-related topics?

Adobe Systems and Meridian Health have both ranked on the FORTUNE 100 Best Places to Work in recent and multiple years. Both are leading organizations in their respective industries. And both have embraced the trend of using video as an integral part of their benefits communications strategies.

Though coming from very different backgrounds, technology and healthcare, Adobe Systems and Meridian Health share some of the same HR needs that large organizations experience. Each of their workforces are distributed over multiple domestic and, in Adobe’s case, international offices. The need to ensure consistent HR messaging across these locations is important.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on December 16, 2011

Later Retirement but Still No Financial Assessment

Last year it was 70. Now 80 is the “new 65”.

Middle class America is expecting to push out full retirement even later due to financial worries. We’re also expecting to have to save more. Yet almost half of us haven’t worked out how long we can last on what we’ve got already.

According to Wells Fargo’s new survey:

  • Almost half said that they expected to continue in the same job or a similar job of similar responsibility (expecting the same income level, we presume).
  • More than half said they need to significantly cut back on spending now to save for retirement.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on November 21, 2011

7 Steps for Deciding What to Include in Your Employee Benefits Video

Here’s another tidbit from our new video course: Transform Benefits Education with On-demand Video.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that we’ve touched on which benefits videos to start with to get the most interest and involvement from your viewers. Will it be your Consumer Directed Health Plan or your 401(k)? You will also have learned what to include in an Open Enrollment video, which is a powerful place to start engaging employees.

Once you’ve decided on which topic to cover, here’s a plan for pulling together everything you COULD talk about and, from that, how to work out what to actually include in your video and what to provide through supporting documents.

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Published by Barbara Navarro on October 28, 2011

Top 5 List: Most Viewed Employee Benefits Videos

If you are incorporating benefits videos into your communications strategy, how do you decide which videos to invest in first?

GuideSpark has created a new video course to assist HR departments making the exciting leap into video communication. In this course, our director of Content Development and Video expert extraordinaire, Joseph Larocque, explains that topics which are more complex or require careful explanation are natural places to start. Good candidates are core benefits, Open Enrollment changes and tough messages such as a premium increase.

“Video can really help people understand how these plans work, how they compare, and why they are compelling,” says Larocque. “If you are introducing one of these in the upcoming year, starting your video communications here will drive adoption.”

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Published by Barbara Navarro on October 21, 2011