Monthly Archive for July, 2009

White Paper: Five Ways to Leverage Web 2.0 to Transform Benefits Communications

Published by JLarocque on July 14, 2009 in Benefits, Solutions and for Employers. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Today, GuideSpark announced availability of a new white paper on the ways to leverage Web 2.0 to transform benefits communications.

It may surprise you to learn that over 50% of employed Americans received a majority of their financial and health products from their employer, making employer-sponsored benefits a critical aspect of an employee’s overall financial wellness.

If there is one statistic that encapsulates the problem that GuideSpark is attempting to solve with our Benefits Learning Center solution, it is this one: “4 out of 5 employers believe that their employees don’t have a good understanding of their benefits.”

Amazing, isn’t it?

U.S. employers spent approximately $1.5 trillion on benefits (18.6% of total compensation) in 2007 and yet only 21% believe that they have been effective in educating employees on this key element of compensation.

So, the question becomes: with all that’s at stake, how do employers like you fix this problem? Well, the first thing to do is to admit that the benefits handbook and other text-heavy approaches to communications are failing you, your benefits investment and your employees. Now, accept that the way that employees learn and get information has fundamentally changed and in a Web 2.0 world, benefits communications must be:

  1. Accessible. Workforces are becoming more and more distributed each day and an employee’s family makes up 60-70% of an employer’s health care cost and are often the ones making the decisions.
  2. Engaging. The attention span of the busy professional is short and shrinking. Short-form, interactive education is what an employee expects in this world of YouTube and Twitter.
  3. Collaborative. The web has become a marketplace of ideas and experiences. Provide your employees with opportunities to understand what decisions colleagues are making and allow them to learn from one another.
  4. Ubiquitous. Stay in front of your employees by leveraging the latest forms of communications including blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter).
  5. Personalized. Integrate planning tools and calculators that allow employees to take what they’ve learned and apply it to their situation. Provide an easy on-ramp to personalized support from experts.

If you follow these principles and put together a highly effective benefits communications strategy, studies show that you can reduce the cost of benefits by 10-20% and significantly improve productivity and retention. To learn more about how to leverage Web 2.0 techniques at your company, please download our white paper.

Raising Financially Responsible Kids Accidentally

Published by JS Wolff on July 6, 2009 in Financial Education and Financial Wellness. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Recently after conducting a financial education workshop for a high tech company, a young lady in her early 20’s wanted to get together to discuss how she could retire early. She had seen an infomercial that described the beauty of passive income and decided it was her ticket to an early exit.

Unfortunately, just after learning of her financial ambitions, she informed me that she had maxed out several credit cards and financed two cars (one for her boyfriend) to the tune of a significant five digit debt.  Even though she was making a good salary as a Human Resource professional, she was unable to pay her monthly bills and had stopped contributing to her 401(k).

Further, responding to the stress, she had just contracted with a credit repair outfit (another TV ad) to whom she had already paid $1,500 for services she was unclear about.  The only thing she knew was that the $1,500 somehow did not offset any of her debt.  Needless to say, it didn’t seem like passive income was going to happen anytime soon.

I wish I could say that I was a perfect dad when it came to teaching my kids about money, I wasn’t. But it looks like my three 20-something kids are avoiding the financial sabotage described above. In hindsight, I think the best idea we transferred as parents was that you don’t keep it all for yourself.  And though none of this was premeditated, the encouragement to give money away resulted in several hoped for financial behaviors and character qualities.  To name a few…

  • Although we were inconsistent about doling out an allowance, our kids figured out ways to make money and still chose to give some of that away. Seemed like it was more meaningful to give money that they had actually earned.
  • Don’ think the word “budget” was ever mentioned but  they seemed to pick up the idea on their own…they only spent what was left over after giving so they had to think more intently about financial  trade-offs early on.
  • The practice of giving apparently drew their attention to needs outside themselves, two of them have spent time working with non-profits and third world countries.

This blog entry is as close to a “raising financially responsible kids” book as you will ever get from this me.  Anything good that happened was purely by accident. But the best part is that accidents can sometimes have surprisingly decent outcomes.  And, as you probably noticed, I think my kids are cool.

As a final thought in keeping with our recent celebration of Independence Day, Thomas Jefferson spoke to the younger generation of his day regarding the wisdom of maintaining personal financial freedom…

“But I know nothing more important to inculcate into the minds of young people than the wisdom, the honor, and the blessed comfort of living within their income, to calculate in good time how much less pain will cost them the plainest stile of living which keeps them out of debt, than after a few years of splendor above their income, to have their property taken away for debt when they have a family growing up to maintain and provide for.”