It’s been well documented that effective corporate health wellness programs have produced positive results for employees and employers over the past twenty years. Probably the most studied, extensive and longest running program is Johnson and Johnson’s “Live for Life”(now called the “J&J Health Wellness Program”) which was rolled out in 1979. Incredibly, due to both financial incentives and a corporate culture that actively promotes healthy behavior, 90% of J&J’s US employees have participated. And considering this includes a pool of 45,000+ employees, the statistics derived from the study are significant.
Tag Archive for 'Financial Wellness'
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A recent BusinessWeek article “Helping an Employee in a Personal Financial Crisis” had a number of eye-opening estimates about the effect of financial distress on employees and employers. The article sites the Personal Finance Employee Education Foundation estimating the cost of personal financial woes to corporations at $4.5 Billion annually and a Chicago consultant estimating a financially unstable worker can cost a company as much as $480 per month.
GuideSpark, Inc. unveiled its Web-hosted workplace financial education service, a comprehensive approach that helps employees make better use of their organization’s benefits and achieve financial security.
The GuideSpark Benefits and Open Enrollment Learning Center is designed to help employers grappling with how to effectively educate employees on workplace benefits. Engaging multimedia lessons provide in-depth and self-paced information about increasingly complex benefits offerings. GuideSpark provides anytime access to benefits education, and can be customized to support key HR events like open enrollment, new hire training and benefit program changes.
The company’s Financial Wellness Center helps employees avoid pervasive financial distractions that add stress, lower productivity and adversely affect health. GuideSpark experts point out that major employers are beginning to get the message: IBM, Pepsi Bottling Group, and Home Depot have already implemented financial education and planning programs for their employees.
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.”
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.
Today, GuideSpark announced two core products focused on the issues of corporate benefits education and employee financial wellness. Over the last 18 months, we’ve had a chance to meet with many employers – from small businesses to large enterprises, from Silicon Valley technology companies to retail chains to government organizations. Not surprisingly, each of these employers carries a similar burden – how to reduce the cost of benefits while continuing to offer a competitive compensation package.
If my brother-in-law was lined up with 10 people and you were asked to pick out the economist, he would be easily identified. In the 35 years I’ve known Mitch, he has never cared a lick about the clothes he wears or the car he drives. There is no pretense or image thing going on whatsoever. He’s just a solid, albeit quirky guy who happens to be intellectually brilliant. And doing things his own way, he retired early, owns a free and clear home in beautiful La Jolla, CA (my sister’s influence) and accumulated a fair amount of wealth, while never wavering from his extreme aversion to risk.
I’ve heard it said that you can tell a lot about a person by what they do with their wallet. In our life, I would say that’s pretty accurate. A few years ago if someone went through our checkbook and debit card receipts, there is would be a pretty consistent pattern tracking what we value most highly. Repetitive expenditures after essentials are traveling to hang out with our adult “kids”, charitable stuff and keeping my wife’s horticultural degree in bloom by regular visits to the local nursery.
All of us have a distinct financial personality or what we call our “Money Pulse”, that is probably different than anyone else’s. What you do or don’t do with your money in tough times says a lot about your core financial beliefs. Often we get caught up in a herd mentality and we gravitate toward what others are doing. Consider Bernie Madoff and the famous people who invested millions without asking fundamental questions. An economic crisis is not a time to follow the crowd…it’s a time to know yourself extremely well.
According to the 2008 American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey, money is often on the minds of most Americans. In fact, the results revealed that money and the state of the economy are two of the top sources of stress for 80 percent of Americans. And symptomatically, one third of Americans reported losing sleep over the economy and personal finance concerns, according to a recent poll by the National Sleep Foundation.
