Category: Benefits

Let’s talk about money. Every time I read an article or internet think-piece about how people are stressed about money, I have to actively stop the incoming eye roll. Of course people are stressed about money. Is that a surprise?

CNN recently reported that half of Americans are spending their whole paycheck; they have no financial cushion. And although individual spending habits contribute to this to some degree, much more of this problem could be associated with the bigger picture. “People are spending a shockingly large amount of income on housing. They have to pay for transportation to get to a job. These costs are going up while their wages stay the same,” said Jennifer Tescher, president and CEO of Center for Financial Services Innovation, according to a CNN article. CFSI is the organization that released this study. Also a factor: irregular income, a problem that won’t go away as the gig economy becomes bigger.

Keeping this in mind, it’s no wonder that so many people aren’t contributing the maximum to health savings accounts and retirement funds. Does raising the HSA contribution ceiling or auto-enrollment/auto-escalation solve that problem? I recently heard that people should be contributing 20 percent to their 401(k) or Roth IRA, which is laughable even for people who don’t spend all of their paycheck. I can contribute 20 percent now because I’m saving money, paying off student loans and living with my parents, but for any self-supporting person out there with expenses for rent, food, utilities, child care, eldercare and health care, is that even possible? And is it possible to do that while also contributing a maximum amount to an HSA?

OK, end of rant. For all of these structural elements in place, of course at least some of these money management problems fall on the individual. And from the company’s point of view, of course individuals need to learn how to be responsible for their own finances. In my experience, money management isn’t something that’s taught in a formal/academic setting; people learn that from role models like their parents or don’t really think about it at all. It’s a positive thing to give people those tools once they enter the workforce.

That’s why I was very interested to stumble upon a New York Times article that highlighted a company with a unique perk: fiscal health days. A paid day off to go over your finances and strategize.

What a fantastic idea. The two people mentioned in the article used their day off in different ways. One man found out his wife had a tumor that would take $100,000 worth of surgery to treat. The two of them used this day to go over their finances and figure out how they would pay for it. According to the article, the man made the decision to change his health insurance to be better protected, attended classes about financial health and learned how to communicate with his wife about money, which helped them sort through everything effectively.

Another man highlighted in this article didn’t use the day for his own financial health. He visited his father and aunt at their retirement community and helped go over their finances. They were all able to have this important conversation about living expenses and insurance.

For more information on financial health strategies, I recently spoke with Nathan Voris, managing director of business strategy at Schwab Retirement Plan Services about financial health tips. Schwab recently released a survey of 300 executives that found that more and more, companies are considering financial wellness programs as a core part of a compensation package.

A few highlights of this conversation: Financial wellness has moved from something “fringe” to mainstream the past two years, said Voris. “It went very quickly from a concept to an expectation,” he added. “You don’t see that quick movement in the 401(k) world very often.”

He also mentioned the “convergence of health and wealth,” which I think is a really spot-on way to articulate how companies are treating fiscal stress as part of total well-being. It’s basically just another way to say “holistic well-being” or one of the other buzz phrases out there, but it’s solid. And it’s relatively new, in the context of the employer space and what companies are doing.

On the topic of employee engagement and usage of these solutions, engagement can be as low as 3 percent and as high as 40 percent, Voris said. It depends on the population, partly. Also, it depends on what you’re communicating about the plan. At Schwab, they tend to be data-driven and evidence-based, added Voris. They dig into the data, figure out the specific pain points of an individual and design things around those issues rather than have a “canned wellness strategy.”

This “personalization” approach isn’t anything new, but worth mentioning considering the stark differences between people’s individual financial situations.

I also asked him how companies can deal with different types of employees, like those who are simply bad with money versus those who are not in a financially secure situation because of some unavoidable, unexpected high cost things (like a major surgery, for example).

“What life stage you’re in has a lot of different factors,” said Voris. “You can’t just assume that everyone who doesn’t save isn’t educated, is making the wrong decision and is a mess. That’s very much not the case.” Again, his company tries to tackle that through data-driven solutions.

The message he tries to drive home for people not in a financially secure position is that small things do matter, even if it doesn’t seem like they do. “Don’t try to boil the ocean,” he said. “Scratch one little thing off the list at a time. Over time, over a few years, those little things turn into big things. That’s how we approach it, recognizing that everyone is a little bit different.”

Voris’ final piece of advice? “We need to stop the guilt trip,” he said. “This picture of a handsome, gray-haired man leaning up against the Corvette and looking out into the ocean … the reality is that’s not real for a lot of people. We need to teach people how to retire with dignity and own their situation.”

That’s a good trend we’re seeing in financial wellness, he added. The solutions are becoming more well-rounded to address the needs of people of different financial situations.

Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

Another day at the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2017 conference in New Orleans. Day 2 brought me a lot of opportunities to speak to HR professionals about everything from the skills gap to benefits strategy to financial wellness. Tropical Storm #Cindy is also coming in, so potentially we’ll all be stuck together for a much, much longer time. We’ll see!

These are some of the ideas I’ve come across day 2:

Financial Wellness Over 20 Years: I spoke with Jeff Tulloch, vice president of MetLife’s PlanSmart program. MetLife has been developing this financial wellness platform over the past 20 years, and just in the past three years, they’ve seen a large spike in interest in this area, Tulloch said. What’s caused this spike, he added, is that employees are stressed and employers have realized that stress is a drain for everyone.

What companies have been doing well with financial wellness is education, he said, but there are two more important areas that we’ll need to see moving forward: motivation and access. By motivation, he meant that HR practitioners could “be more courageous endorsers of what they offer and help their employees take the next steps.”

By access, he meant a wide range of access points for information and advice, not only digital. There’s also human interaction, like an on-site financial adviser or a call center someone can access during open enrollment.

“When we get those three things, education, motivation and access, we see that people are in the position to act,” said Tulloch.

A Little Nudge: Lazlo Bock, former senior vice president of people operations at Google/Alphabet gave a speech that, although not about health/wellness, did offer one tidbit of advice on wellness. He called it “nudging.” The idea behind it is that a small change in the work environment can make a larger impact and that businesses can nudge employees in the right direction. The trick is to not get too into micro-managing. You can’t remove employee choice, but you can lightly nudge them to make a choice that’s better for them.

Bock gave an example of an office based in New York. It offered healthy (nuts, fruit, etc.) and unhealthy snacks (M&M’s), all in opaque containers. The company made a small change in presentation and began putting the unhealthy snacks in yellow containers. The result was that employees consumed a significantly smaller number of calories in the following weeks. They were less likely to dig into the M&M’s in the differentiated, yellow containers than the opaque ones. The choice was still there, but perhaps they began thinking about their choice more when the healthy and unhealthy options looked different.

I don’t know if this same result would happen to any company who uses this exact opaque container/ yellow container model, but the idea behind it is solid.

New Legislation: Lisa Horn, director of congressional affairs and leader of SHRM’s Workplace Flexibility Initiative, spoke about a new work-flex bill being introduced to Congress. They worked with U.S. Rep. Mimi Walters, R-California, to craft it.

The bill is still being changed and tweaked, so I won’t go into specifics. Here’s the gist, though. It’s a workplace flexibility bill that does something about both paid leave and flexibility in the workplace. Currently, there is nothing on a national level addressing these, but many states and cities have their own individual rules, which causes problems for national companies with a presence in multiple cities or states.

In this bill, if an employer voluntarily chooses to adopt these standards, they will be deemed to have satisfied their state and local mandates. The idea behind the bill, Horn added, is that it would be more generous for employees than the state/local mandates.

I’ll be interested to see what happens with this and how far it gets. Also, what those TBD details are like how many days of paid leave an employee would get.

SHRM hopes to officially introduce it after Congress’ July 4 recess.

“HR is Like Golf”: I found this entertaining and something that honestly could apply to any job. This is what one man said when he was asked what he does when things get hard in HR. You can take 99 bad shots and one good shot, he said, and it’s that one good one that keeps you coming back to play golf.

Moving Forward from a Bad Rep: In one session, a woman said the hardest part of HR is overcoming a bad reputation, like with the bad press HR got in the Uber sexual harassment fiasco. She added that as an HR practitioner, every new organization she works at is an opportunity to tell a new HR story and change what HR looks like. Then the employees who work there will have a different impression and HR and carry that with them where they go next. “I can only control what my HR world looks like and what my people experience,” she said, mentioning the importance of starting small, focusing on your own organization and letting other proactive HR people do the same at their own company.

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Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

The 2017 Society for Human Resource Management conference is in New Orleans this year, which I love. I got to stay with my sister and her 60-pound pit bull for a couple of days before entering Conference-land. We went on long walks in the heat, took a yoga class and ate some good food. We spent one Friday evening at a small Irish pub, where none of these non-HR professionals knew much about HR at all — but it still came up in conversation.

This is going to be really obvious, but benefits truly impact people’s lives, even if people don’t regularly think about HR. One person I talked to that night is using his unlimited PTO to take a motorcycle trip across the country. Another person got to leave work early that afternoon and have some Abita beers/frozen Irish coffees with us because of a policy at her office; take shorter lunch breaks throughout the week and you can leave early Friday. We didn’t mean to have this conversation about workplace benefits, but there it was.

This first night of SHRM’s conference, the HR association released its 2017 “Employee Benefits” survey, which cemented this feeling that benefits really do make up a large part of the employee value proposition.

A couple of statistics stuck out to me at first: one-third of surveyed organizations have increased their benefits offerings in the past year in an effort to be an employer of choice and attract the best people. Not surprising, of course. What interested me was that the value of benefits accounted for, on average, about 30 percent of an employee’s total compensation (30 percent in private industry; 37 percent in state and local government).

This was relevant because of an article I read about how employees shouldn’t just negotiate for a higher salary. Negotiating for alternative forms of compensation like benefits is just as important. This article pointed out areas like flex time, transportation and student loan repayment, which an employee can ask for if, for example, the company is not in the financial situation to offer a raise.

Wellness was a benefit that saw a large increase in the survey. A quarter of these companies have increased their wellness benefits, and three-quarters said their wellness program was “somewhat to very effective on reducing health care costs.”

I’ve seen statistics like this a lot, and they disagree greatly with other stats that say wellness programs don’t save money at all. There are very logical arguments on both sides of this wellness coin. From what I can tell, employee wellness programs aren’t going anywhere, whether they notably reduce employers’ and employees’ health care costs or not. What they do is help give people resources to make healthy changes in their lives.

Interestingly, in the wellness space, fewer employers offer smoking cessation programs than before. The person presenting this information, SHRM Vice President of Research Shonna Waters, did mention that “sitting is the new standing” line we’ve been hearing about so much. While smoking cessation programs are in the decline in the employer space, sit-stand desks are spiking upward, from 13 percent in 2013 to 44 percent in 2017.

My take on this? Since the “Mad Men” era 50 years ago, smoking’s prevalence in, well, everywhere has declined. People are also much more educated on the health risks of smoking. No one can pretend it’s harmless anymore.

In an employer wellness program, wouldn’t it be more valuable to focus on a problem that’s less understood and more prevalent in 2017? Even though people still smoke, other harmful habits are growing in prevalence. Those problems deserve a little attention, too, and many people could use the educational opportunity.

Three more days of the conference and so many more benefits related sessions to go! I’ll be sharing my takeaways from sessions on this Workforce blog and at my twitter handle @andie_burjek. Any questions in the benefits/wellness space, comment or tweet at me and I’ll scope out the answer in this room of an estimated 15k HR professionals.

Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

I recently attended the Midwest Business Group on Health’s 37^th annual conference, where they hit the nail on many employer-sponsored benefits related topics.

I was prepared to be very “eye-rolly” about the “employers as superheroes” theme, but, to be honest, I dug it. It meant a lot of corny jokes (who doesn’t appreciate a solid corny joke?) and it meant the speakers, people with impressive careers in the employee benefits space, often identified themselves as a superhero before talking about the heavy stuff.

(My answer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She had a stake named Mr. Pointy. She talked like a valley girl. She dusted a lot of vampires. See, it’s fun.)

Here are some of the major takeaways I got from various speakers:

Health Care: Yes, employer-sponsored health care was a priority topic. Needless to say, there is a lot of uncertainty around the GOP health care bill. It doesn’t help that there will be more than one in the future. Although the revived and reconsidered American Health Care Act narrowly passed the House, the Senate is a whole other story. The AHCA is not popular, and the Senate is creating their own health care legislation.

A few panelists and speakers had different things to say about health care. I appreciated the point of view of health care entrepreneur/medical economist JD Kleinke, who made jokes, shared vacation photos and somehow made a session about health care funny. A few things that I found valuable:

• On consumer-driven health plans: No matter what you do with benefits design, it won’t change the basic fact that people are not rational consumers for any product. And when it comes to feeling better and getting healthy, that doesn’t change. He gave a silly example of people paying twice as much for a brand of cereal that wasn’t very different from the generic brand at all, but people still paid for it. Use the same logic with health care annnnnd … can consumers of health care really be rational consumers if they assume the most expensive option is the best option for them, or for one of their loved ones?
• He does not expect the AHCA to go through, for a few reasons. One is that half of Americans have pre-existing conditions, he noted. Many Trump voters and Republicans believe that preexisting conditions should be covered (which the AHCA doesn’t do well, many have argued). If their constituents don’t want this, then the legislators voting on the bill probably won’t vote for it.
• His level of nonchalance about this was noteworthy to me because for employers, the uncertainty around health care is one major stress. How do you make a long-term plan when you don’t know what the health care landscape will look like in 5 years? So, hearing a medical economist speak like this in a way that was not anxious or uncertain was refreshing.

Pharmacy Spend: Cheryl Larson, vice president of the MBGH, and a panel of experts also had a discussion about the relationship between employers and pharmacy benefits managers. PBMs have been in the news a lot recently: A few weeks ago, Anthem broke up with Express Scripts, arguing over $15 billion. This week, Express Scripts announced a deal with drug price transparency company GoodRx to reduce drug prices for the uninsured. Also, states like California and New York are beginning to consider and push forward PBM transparency laws.

This topic was especially interesting for me, as I’m writing on it for the next issue of Workforce. A lot of people have had differing ideas for why prescription drug costs are increasing at such an alarming rate. No matter who’s doing the finger pointing or who’s being pointed at, the key question remains: How do companies contain pharmacy drug spend?

More to come about this from me later for Workforce, but for the time being … what’s been a common theme in this conference and in interviews with various people is the need for collective action, and for employers to work together and share ideas to push for change that will benefit all employers.

Other Noted Takeaways (Thoughts? Comment Below)

• Consumer-driven health plans won’t lead to major change in health care in the big picture. If we’re just changing how and who pays for care, does it really make a difference?
• Misdiagnosis is a major cost driver for employer health care costs. Sally Welborn, senior vice president, global benefits, Walmart Stores Inc., noted that inappropriate care (care that should not be delivered) accounts for 30 percent of the GDP spent on health care (which is 18 percent, by the way). “The worst dollar spent is the dollar spent on care that does not need to be delivered,” said Welborn. A solution Walmart uses is centers of excellence.
• Vision and dental should not be considered side benefits. “We focus so much on medical, we forget about the other two that are integral to the health of the individual,” said one panelist.
• Obesity is a complicated but necessary issue to deal with in the workplace. As body mass index rises, so do health care costs, presentee-ism and absenteeism costs, and workers’ comp costs. “Telling people with obesity to eat less and move more is like telling someone with depression to cheer up,” said presenter Gabriel Smolarz, quoting Dr. Ayra Sharma, a leading obesity specialist in Canada. This attitude shows lack of understanding of the disease. He also noted that a 5 to 10 percent decrease in body weight can make a significant impact on employees’ health and employers’ cost. What can employers do? I don’t have the answer now, but suggestions are welcome.

Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below, or email at aburjek@humancapitalmedia.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.